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Septuagenarian Magnus Tait is a loner in an area of Shetland where everyone seems to be a loner, despite the tight-knit community's insistence that everyone in it knows everyone else, and everything about them. Magnus Tait is developmentally disabled. Magnus Tait keeps a caged raven. Since his mother's death, Magnus hasn't had any friends, and half the town is convinced that he is guilty of an unsolved child murder from years back. So it isn't much of a surprise that, when precocious 16-year-old newcomer Catherine Ross turns up dead after visiting the old man's crumbling farmhouse twice. Magnus Tait is the local peanut gallery's number one suspect, even if detective Jimmy Perez isn't convinced. Allegedly descended from a Spanish sailor shipwrecked during the Armada, brought up on an even more remote island, and divorced by his wife, Perez is a bit of a loner himself. And then there's Sally Henry, daughter of the village's only primary school teacher. Sally is sick of being a celebrity in the way that the teacher's child must, and saw in Catherine an ambitious young woman who, conversely, threw down her difference like a gauntlet, in a way that neither Sally nor Perez has ever found the guts to do. This is the beginning of Ann Cleeves's engrossing, character-driven mystery RAVEN BLACK. It's pretty much a rule of the genre that the local weirdo, the Boo Radley, is the usual suspect, and that, like the original, in Harper Lee's TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, Boo didn't do it. Suspecting him keeps the upstanding members of the community from suspecting each other. Reading RAVEN BLACK, it was fairly easy to guess who had done some of it, as well as who hadn't done anything, but the real mystery is how it was done, and why, and in what ways other people have contributed to the murders and the chain of events that surrounded them. To know a little part of the answer doesn't neutralise the story's power as this part makes the reader as distrustful of the characters as the villagers are of each other. The characters are perfect: striking, complex individuals. Anyone who has ever moved to a small town and wanted to get out will empathise, to a point, with Sally; anyone who never felt in should click automatically with Perez. Cleeves documents in painstaking detail the experience of wanting to see and do and be more than such a place has encompassed in its endless history, or will acknowledge in its culture. Despite being a murder mystery, RAVEN BLACK is a book about the ordinary; the sometimes dreadfully ordinary. It's the kind of mystery that, once you've finished it, you'll want to read again -- to rediscover the beauty in the details, and to revisit the questions that remain unanswered.
Reviewed by Rebecca Nesvet, October 2005
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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