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Fair Isle, the UK's most remote inhabited island, is tiny, only about three miles long and a mile and a half wide. Its resident population comprises about seventy crofters and knitters. It is here to his boyhood home that Shetland police detective Jimmy Perez has brought his fiancée Fran to get to know his family and make plans for the wedding. An underlying sub-text for the visit is the question of whether Perez will want to return home and assume his familial duty to take over the croft and produce another James Perez to keep the name alive on the island. And if he does, would Fran be prepared to come with him? Domestic matters have rapidly to yield to a murder investigation, however, a case which Perez has initially to undertake on his own, as a gale has cut the island off from its connections to the Shetland mainland. It's not a situation that makes Jimmy happy and it is compounded by the fact that the murdered woman is the warden of a bird research facility, not an Islander, and the likely suspects are also connected with the research station either as staff or as birders and seem very foreign to Perez as he noses his way gently into the case. Things get quite rapidly worse as another woman, the cook at the bird station and another southerner, is also murdered. Could there possibly be a serial killer at large and is Fran, along with every woman, at risk, or are the two deaths connected in some less irrational way? Jimmy believes the latter and methodically goes about trying to tease out the identity of the murderer before any more harm is done. BLUE LIGHTNING has many of the hallmarks of the classic country house murder, though of course the country house in this instance is a scientific research station in a converted lighthouse. There's the limited number of possible suspects, the initial murder victim, a most unpleasant woman who will not really be much missed, the detective on his own without the support of modern forensics. But the changes Cleeves rings on the familiar formula result in a novel of substantially greater depth than your classic intellectual puzzle. Perez's detection has the strengths of his weaknesses - he is far too self-conscious, far too introspective and self-doubting, to qualify as a detective in the classic mould. But this vulnerability makes it possible for him to ask the right questions and get the answers that a more arrogant or aggressive interrogator might well miss. Angela, the first murder victim, might well have been unpleasant, as is frequently the case in the standard recipe for this kind of novel, but as we come to learn more of her life, we do develop some sympathy for her. And the second victim, Jane, the cook, on the island in flight from an unhappy lesbian affair, is vividly present and warmly attractive from the outset. BLUE LIGHTNING is the fourth in the colourfully named Shetland Quartet and should therefore be the last of the set. Certainly the shocking, harrowing conclusion would seem to provide a full stop to the series. But the jacket copy informs us that Cleeves is home in Yorkshire "hard at work writing the next in the series." If this is indeed so, then readers can look forward to further developments in the life of Jimmy Perez in a series that has the capacity to startle and emotionally engage. § Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, October 2010
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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