Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

 

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves, 376 pages

Raven Black is Ann Cleeves' debut novel and first installment of the Shetland Island Mystery series. DI Jimmy Perez must solve the murder of a young woman in a small, isolated community in the northernmost part of the UK. Perez must battle small-town small mindedness in his dogged pursuit of the truth. The deeper Perez digs into the investigation, the more community ghosts he unearths. 

The mystery is knitted together neatly like a familiar Fair Isle sweater. The pacing is consistent, the ending is satisfying and masterfully seeded, and the characters are ordinary , flawed people. The stylized speech is mostly slang and local colloquialisms instead of written phonetically, which is a score for readability.  

Raven Black by Ann Cleeves

(Shetland Island #1)
 374 pages / 11 hrs, 20 mins

"Long a celebrated crime writer in Britain, Ann Cleeves' fame went international when she won the coveted Duncan Lawrie Dagger for this amazing suspense novel, Raven Black. Like Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse or Peter Robinson's Inspector Banks, Cleeves' new detective, Inspector Jimmy Perez, is a very private and perceptive man whose bailiwick is a remote hamlet in the Shetland Islands. It is a cold January morning, and Shetland lies beneath a deep layer of snow. Trudging home, Fran Hunter's eye is drawn to a splash of color on the frozen ground, ravens circling above. It is the strangled body of her teenage neighbor, Catherine Ross. The locals on the quiet island stubbornly focus their gaze on one man - loner and simpleton Magnus Tait. But when detective Jimmy Perez and his colleagues from the mainland insist on opening out the investigation, a veil of suspicion and fear is thrown over the entire community. For the first time in years, Catherine's neighbors nervously lock their doors while a killer lives on in their midst." --from the publisher

It was good, but I was expecting great. I think I would have enjoyed it more if my expectations weren't so high. There are a lot of interconnected characters so it can be hard to keep them straight at times. Add that to their colorful pasts, and it gets even more complicated. And the ending felt a bit disjointed and anticlimactic. I may try another in the series sometime. I give this one three out of five stars.