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WHITE NIGHTS
by Ann Cleeves
St Martin's Minotaur, September 2008
352 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 0312384335


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Summer in Shetland and, after a grim winter, Inspector Jimmy Perez is looking forward to the endless days and the chance to solidify his relationship with Fran, an artist who has fairly recently taken up residence on the island after working in London.

At the vernissage in the fictional community of Biddista of her joint art show with gallery owner Bella Sinclair, in the mild madness that seems to characterize what Islanders call the "simmer dim," everything goes slightly awry. Attendance is far less than anticipated, despite Bella's prominence and the presence of her nephew, Robbie, a Celtic musician of some note. Then a stranger, after making a tour of the paintings, sits down on the floor of the gallery and commences to shed heart-broken tears. When Perez tries to intervene, the man professes total amnesia.

The next morning, Kenny Thomson, farmer and occasional fisherman, finds the stranger hanging in a storage hut on the jetty, an apparent suicide. Jimmy Perez' hopes of a peaceful time with Fran are dashed. When it becomes apparent that this is no suicide, Roy Taylor, head of the Inverness team is called in to head up the investigation.

Taylor and Perez have worked a murder investigation before, and their relationship is largely cordial, though not close. Taylor is uneasy in Shetland, impatient with Perez' slow and intuitive methods that are rooted in his experience of the islands and their ways. Originally from Liverpool, he appears at home nowhere, abandoning human closeness for an excessive devotion to work.

Though its cover proclaims the book "A Thriller," it is nothing of the kind. Rather it is a dense exploration of how human beings relate to one another, lovingly, greedily, obsessively, relationships that the long and closed history of the island can only magnify. Poor Taylor doesn't really have a clue about it all, while Perez may have one or two too many.

One of the most interesting relationships is that of Kenny and his wife Edith, now middle-aged and married for over thirty years. Contrary to conventional expectations, theirs is a marriage that has grown closer and more affectionate over time and Cleeves is especially strong in representing love in middle age, not something that attracts an overwhelming number of novelists.

I have to confess that was not altogether persuaded by the solution to the murders (the initial crime grows to three) but I was wholly convinced by Cleeves's reading of Shetland - remote, but not unchanged and certainly not unchanging, stolid, close-mouthed, but ever so slightly maddened by the white nights of midsummer. Alas, there are only two more seasons left.

Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, September 2008

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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