Book review – Red Bones

“This is about bones in the land. Old, red bones.”

This review contains spoilers for Raven Black.

Red Bones is Cleeves’s third book of her Shetland series. This story centres the island of Whalsay, and brings to the fore Perez’s young, hapless assistant, Sandy Wilson. His grandmother falls victim to what appears to be an accidental shooting after the discovery of an ancient, 15th-century skull in an archeological dig near her home. The facts around her death don’t quite make sense, but the uncertain nature of her death means Perez has to investigate on his own, without the benefit of Roy Taylor of Inverness and his team to help.

I first read this in 2019, having been led to the Shetland series via the BBC television adaptation, where I completely misread the book because I assumed the murderer was the same in the novel as the adaptation. It turns out the BBC was creative, and I had misinterpreted almost all the novel’s clues. This time, I was able to read the book without that distraction, and it has been a revelation.

The novel begins with introducing Sandy’s grandmother, Mima Wilson, whose croft is hosting an archeological dig. We meet a rival family of the Wilsons, the Cloustons, who have a lot more money than the Wilsons. Soon, it appears that Ronald Clouston has accidentally shot Mima whilst shooting for rabbits in the dark, but this being a mystery novel, we wonder if the story is that simple. As the story unfolds, we see its three central themes come to life. Red Bones is an introduction to Whalsay, an island off the Mainland of Shetland. It also gives us an introduction to the Shetland Bus, which was a series of transports between Shetland and Norway during the Second World War. Cleeves invents some history here, where the members of the Whalsay families in Red Bones were once part of the Shetland Bus. We learn also that Shetland was once part of a giant mercantile alliance called the Hanseatic League. But at the heart of the novel is the tension between two families who are bound by common blood and past friendship, but divided by greed and envy, as one family is much wealthier than the other, and judgement has sprung up between them. Judgement and resentment both.

Sandy Wilson becomes a point-of-view character for the first time in the series, which makes sense as he is not only a police officer and recurring character, but also a member of one of these families. He is Mima’s grandson. We get the Cloustons’ point of view from Anna, the wife of the man who seems to have accidentally killed Mima. She is a new mother, a southerner come north to Shetland, who has grand plans for starting a new business by knitting Shetland knitting patterns. Anna and Sandy cover the Whalsay ground well, and also provide two contrasting interpretations of the events that are going on. On top of that, we have Hattie, a shy, brilliant archaeologist working on the dig, with a history of mental illness and a host of past demons. She is a classic Cleeves character, whose psychology is fascinating and so easy to sympathize with.

With so many themes and points of view, we have a fiendishly difficult puzzle. Is Mima’s death really an accident? Was she killed by her own family to secure her land? Was she killed by the Cloustons due to some old family feud? Or does the archeological dig come into it somehow? Maybe this has something to do with the Shetland Bus, or the great chasm of wealth between the families, or Mima’s past, or something else entirely. Unfortunately, though the solution is clever, a true piece of misdirection, it is also the novel’s only weak point. The clues that lead to the solution are so poorly signposted I couldn’t find them earlier in the novel. That isn’t playing entirely fair. Thematically, however, the solution makes complete sense, so this is not a big problem for the story.

The book provides so much character development for recurring characters, making Shetland a story beyond just a series of crime mysteries. Perez isn’t quite as interesting as Vera (but then who is?), but it is quite satisfying to follow this slow, dreamy man solving crimes, to watch him come to terms with his new relationship with Fran. It was a great decision to leave Fran out of this novel by sending her and her daughter Cassie to London. It gives more space to other characters, and allows Perez to think about her in her absence, giving him a new perspective on his relationship. The only downside is that Red Bones is now the third book in the series, and whilst Perez supposedly has a good relationship with Cassie, we don’t ever see it develop.

The character that gets the most out of Red Bones is Sandy. He is a very typical character in crime novels, the hero’s assistant who isn’t very competent or mature. In this novel, Sandy gets his own space, and we see him grow, though imperfectly, through being given more responsibility, and having to face the tragedy that has befallen him and his family. He is fleshed out in much greater depth. We see him on his home turf, and we see him both as family of the victim and part of the investigating team. He is really the main character of this novel, and was portrayed with deft skill.

And adding to all that, we get to experience another aspect of Shetland in such an atmospheric way. Having tasted the Viking darkness of midwinter and the ethereal light of midsummer, we are taken to the fogs of Shetland in Spring, to mist and earth and drams of whisky. As Cleeves is a crime writer, I think her novels are unfortunately analysed only as thrillers, but really these are books about Shetland and about people, and I think they are really powerful stories about the human psyche and the nature of communities under strain. A supreme book from probably the most consistently great crime novelists of the present, Red Bones is a pure pleasure to read.