This review contains spoilers for Raven Black and Blue Lightning.
The penultimate entry in Shetland sees some of the best character writing and plotting of the series, with the book’s major weakness being in biting off more plot than it can chew, for the ending is a little contrived. The premise recalls Raven Black, the series’ first entry. We have returned to Ravenswick in midwinter, and red clothing is seen against the grey and black to indicate a body. But instead of a girl dead in the snow, we have a mysterious woman dead in an empty croft, the body revealed by a landslide.
We also have a completely different mood. The point-of-view characters are Jimmy Perez, Willow Reeves (his boss, who flies in to solve the case), Sandy Wilson, and a neighbour of Perez’s, Jane Hay, a former alcoholic whose family turns out to be connected to the case. Once more, Cleeves excels at writing brooding village mysteries, where all the suspects and witnesses are interconnected. The identity of the body is a mystery for nearly a quarter of the book, before that mystery is untangled. Meanwhile, we meet the Hays. Jane was once an alcoholic, her husband might be connected to the dead woman, and of her two sons, one clearly is struggling with something and behaving very oddly.
We also have the Rogersons. The father is on the council and a lawyer who handled the empty property. The daughter is a teacher at Perez’s stepdaughter’s school. Finally, there is a friend of Jane’s, Simon Agnew, who runs Befriend Shetland, where people go to get therapeutic help. All these characters are interrelated in complex ways, and have many secrets they wish to keep buried. As is typical in most of Cleeves’s books, a second murder propels the plot forward, building until a gripping ending with a surprising twist.
Cleeves writes superb character development for our recurring characters. Cassie’s relationship with Perez has a small part to play, but it finally feels developed enough to be real. Perez, Willow and Sandy are clearly developing towards the ends of their respective character arcs, and all feel as if they have grown without ever compromising who they are. Perez’s calm and quiet, Willow’s impatience and impulsiveness, and Sandy’s need for approval are all shown here. There is a beautiful character moment when Sandy slurps his tea. It’s such a small thing, but of course Sandy wouldn’t be able to sip tea quietly.
The only let down is that there are so many twists in the plot that some of them are dealt with carelessly. Some of the red herrings in the novel are inadequately explained, and the solution, whilst surprising, is unearned, requiring vast leaps of logic to believe. There is a brilliant clue well-buried that lets us know how we might have guessed the murderer’s identity, but the motive for the murders is fashioned out of naught: there was no way to know this would be the solution, and that is unfair in a crime mystery. Nonetheless, the brilliance of Cleeves’s writing is such that even if the solution is a little flimsy, the immersive unsettling mood, the depth of the characters, the twists in the plot and the beautiful evocation of the stark, wild beauty of the Shetlands make it all worthwhile.
Wet Broken Things 