Review: Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

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Raven Black by Ann Cleeves


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I very much enjoyed the Shetland setting of this book, which is well-drawn without drowning you in local color. (Really, I treat mysteries as a kind of travel writing. I love to read books about crimes being committed and solved in exotic and interesting places I'd like to visit.) I also liked the character of policeman Jimmy Perez, who has the interesting problem of being an outsider to everyone: to anyone from the U.K. mainland, he's a Shetlander, but the other Shetlanders all think of him as "the policeman from Fair Isle."

The plot is pretty straightforward: A high-school girl is murdered. Suspicion falls on a mentally-disabled old man who might have been implicated in the disappearance of another girl many years earlier. It seems like an open-and-shut case, but Jimmy Perez isn't convinced - and has to catch the real killer before another girl is murdered. The twists and turns of the story are well-paced.

I'm not entirely sure how I felt about the narrative style: this book is told in multiple third-person POV, with most of the plausible murder suspects getting a turn at narrating. This means that you get a lot of scenes where characters have to think about the murder while very carefully not mentioning in interior monologue details that would prove their guilt or innocence. Or even where they think about things in interior monologue that seem to implicate them, but turn out to be red herrings. I found this mildly irritating, although this can hardly be the first novel I've read to use such a device.

It'll be interesting to see how this series continues on. The particular Shetland community that this book is set in is so small that even after just one book, it's going to be hard for Perez to go about his business without running into relatives of the killer or people about whom he learned unpleasant things while investigating the murders. This could start to feel a bit claustrophobic, although I suppose Cleeves could always move the action to another of the Shetland islands if things start to get a bit too cramped.

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