Crime fiction lovers were bereft when Jimmy Perez left the Shetland stage in Wild Fire in 2018. But we’re a patient lot, and seven years later our dour detective is back, but on a different Scottish archipelago – Orkney!
These days, Jimmy is happily settled into life with his partner Willow Reeves and their four-year-old son James. Willow is also his boss, but she’s heavily pregnant and taking a back seat at Christmas as her due date approaches. But Jimmy and Willow are about to be thrown into the fray when a local man is found murdered, his head stoved in with a precious piece of Orkney’s history.
The pair of Westray Story Stones, once part of a neolithic settlement and carved with runes by some later Viking interlopers, are safely held in the town’s heritage centre – until one of them is used as a murder weapon and its companion stone goes missing.
The victim is Archie Stout, a well known and well loved local man who also happens to be one of Jimmy’s closest friends. Thus it is that we see another side to the calm and collected Scotsman we’ve come to know and admire. Jimmy is distraught, and too close to the case, but with the weather closing in and Christmas just around the corner, officers from Glasgow seem reluctant to head out to the wild islands and take over the reins. Instead, Jimmy must set his emotions aside, and with Willow working the case too it surely won’t be long until the culprit is unmasked.
When did Ann Cleeves ever make things that simple? Instead we are engulfed by a tide of characters, some locals, others visitors, all of whom could have committed the crime, and many of whom could have a motive. It soon becomes clear that Archie, well known as a Jack the lad and with a temper that could flare in a heartbeat, also had a talent for recklessness.
Cleeves has taken a gamble with the Perez faithful, but anchors him in a new location while subtly filling us in on the place. Orkney is just as bleak and isolated as Shetland but it has its own quirks and a unique history – the Westray Story Stones are real artefacts, although I doubt they’ve ever been the centre of a modern day murder investigation.
Another element of local tradition is the Orkney Ba’, a traditional mob football match played in Kirkwall between the Uppies and the Doonies on Christmas Day and New Year’s Day. It will play an important part in this story, and it’s a pleasure to luxuriate in the cinematic descriptions of the drama that unfolds.
It’s good to have Jimmy Perez back, and this is a more grounded version of the well-loved detective. Family life is certainly suiting him and the run-of-the-mill domestic to-ing and fro-ing between him and Willow add some relief to a dark and disturbing case. I’m not sure Tosh, his number two in the Shetland television series but not in the novels, would recognise this version of the man she worked with for so long. He’s much more in touch with his emotions and a far cry from the solitary figure portrayed on the book cover.
The lone wolf has found his pack and it’s a change that may jar with some dyed-in-the-wool Shetland fans, but balanced against an exciting and interesting new location, the Killing Stones should satisfy the majority of readers who took the original series of books to their hearts. Cleeves has revealed that this book was intended as a one-off, but she’s now rethinking the strategy and more Jimmy Perez books may well be in the pipeline. Just think what that could do for the Orkney tourist industry!
Watch Ann Cleeves read from The Killing Stones here.
Macmillan
Print/iBook/Kindle
£11.00
CFL Rating: 4 Stars
