Blue Lightning: A Thriller (Shetland Book 4)

Blue Lightning: A Thriller (Shetland Book 4) Kindle Edition by veteran British mystery author Ann Cleeves. Cleeves, who might once have been considered obscure, now finds herself in an enviable position: her Shetland series, starring Douglas Henshall, is airing as a great hit on Britain’s BBC, which attracted over 12 million viewers in its first two nights on the air. And her Vera series is airing as a great hit on Britain’s ITV. And both series are great hits on America’s PBS.In the book at hand, Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez takes his fiancé Fran home to Fair Isle, one of the tiny islands off Scotland, mysterious, dark and beautiful, known as the Shetlands, that he comes from, to meet his parents. The island happens to be a magnet for bird watchers, who congregate at the local inn and lighthouse. Angela, the warden of the Fair Isle Field Center, the island’s bird observatory center, a very attractive celebrity scientist, who had an eye for the lads, is murdered. In his investigation, Perez uncovers a nest of complicated relationships, petty academic rivalries. Perez also discovers that some of the suspects may be very close to him indeed. The stormy weather adds to the general gloom as more bodies pile up.Cleeves grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, BIRD OBSERVATORY COOK-- fancy that! –an auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.While Cleeves was cooking in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, she met her husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist. She was attracted less by the ornithology than the bottle of malt whisky she saw in his rucksack when she showed him his room. Soon after they married, Tim was appointed warden of Hilbre, a tiny tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary. They were the only residents, there was no electricity or water provided, access to the mainland was at low tide across the shore. If a person's not heavily into birds - and Cleeves wasn't - there's not much to do on Hilbre. So she started writing. Her first series of crime novels features the elderly naturalist, George Palmer-Jones. A couple of these books are said by those familiar with them to be seriously dreadful.For Britain’s National Year of Reading, Cleeves was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. It came as a revelation to her that it was possible to get paid for talking to readers about books. She went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the Inside Books project, became Cheltenham Literature Festival's first reader-in-residence and still enjoys working with libraries. Cleeves' short film for Border TV, Catching Birds, won a Royal Television Society Award. She has twice been short listed for a CWA Dagger Award - once for her short story The Plater, and the following year for the Dagger in the Library award.In 2006 Cleeves was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award of the Crime Writers' Association, for Raven Black, the first volume of her Shetland Quartet. That win was worth £20,000 to her, the richest prize given for detective fiction. The success was announced at the 2006 Dagger Awards ceremony at the Waldorf Hilton, in London's Aldwych, on Thursday June 29, 2006. She said: "I have never won anything before in my life, so it was a complete shock - but lovely of course.. The evening was relatively relaxing because I'd lost my voice and knew that even if the unexpected happened there was physically no way I could utter a word. So I wouldn't have to give a speech. My editor was deputed to do it!" Cleeves’ books have been translated into sixteen languages: she's also a bestseller in Scandinavia and Germany. Her novels sell widely and to critical acclaim in the United States. Raven Black was shortlisted for the Martin Beck award for best translated crime novel in Sweden in 2006.Cleeves writes a good thriller, of course. Her narrative, descriptive and dialog writing is about as good as it gets. She gives us not only Fair Isle on the page, but all its birds, too. This book is a variant on the locked-room mystery, and a very good one indeed. In fact, the pages kept turning kind of breathlessly for me as Perez worked his way through his limited pool of suspects, throwing up one red herring after another. Love both her televised series, nice to finally read one of the books they’re based on, get an appreciation of just how good a writer she is.

We see Jimmy Pérez in all lights here, son, lover, detective, father. Truly gutted after this book, but we continue

Boo. Excellent read, but said. Also, I've never figured it who did it before tells us. I'm usually pretty good at that. Is it so all with Joe are free zero clues?

This is number four in Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island/Jimmy Perez series, and though the quality of the writing is still very good, the eclectic plot and stunning ending are not going to please every reader. The story has Jimmy Perez and his fiance Fran returning to Fair Isle--the smallest and most remote of the Shetland Islands--to spend pre-wedding time with his parents. In the first 24 hours of the homecoming, the young and promiscuous director of the island's bird and nature center is murdered and Jimmy is back on the job until an investigatory team from the mainland is able to get to Fair Isle. As he sorts through the suspects, a second murder occurs. This one is more baffling and tragic in some ways than the first. As Perez closes in on the killer, he finds his own family directly involved and in the story's final moments cannot prevent a third and most shocking killing from taking place.As always, author Cleeves weaves some very interesting references to the natural setting of Fair Isle, and in this book in particular, she goes to town with wonderful details about the bird life that the island is known for and about the people who are drawn to birding. The juxtaposition of the beauties and dangers of nature in the Shetlands and personal struggles and intrigues of the humans living there is one of the great strengths of this series.While I liked "Blue Lightning" and really do think it's a good read, there were elements of it that detracted from its overall impact. A minor one is the title which has no real import for the story line. A second was making one of the secondary characters a lead narrator of the action and then suddenly eliminating her from the story without plausible explanation until the last pages of the novel. The book's ending involves a shocking event--as mentioned--but I don't think that the motive for that event bears up to reader scrutiny when the final page is turned.In the final analysis, I thought this was an intelligent book with enough originality and action to make it an above average crime novel/police procedural. I will continue to read anything this author has published.

Thoroughly enjoy Ann Cleeve style - she creates the claustrophobic atmosphere of a tiny northern island with enclosed natives mixing side by side with weird visitors to the island. Some reviewers describe her narration as slow, even turgid: I do not agree, her pace is entirely fitting for me with the characters and breezy-cum-dreamy Shetland Isles. Felt somewhat chuffed too at working out who the perpetrator was two-thirds in.Spoiler alert: going to admit to being considerably dismayed at the death of Perez's fiancée Fran as the third victim right at he end. I was bought into the sideline story of he and Fran while he solved cases and I suppose assumed that this would be an ongoing sub-theme through later publications. But this closed the book on a really dark tone, now not sure I want to read the rest of the series; no bubbly Fran and presumably Perez will be even more morose than usual. May pick up book five as my holiday read in a few weeks and see if I re-engage.

In this the fourth book in Ann Cleve's Shetland series Cleves sets the murderer amongst a small closed community of disparate odd-ball suspects living in a bird observatory on Jimmy Perez's home island of Fair Isle. Once again the rugged Shetland landscape and its extreme weather play a part in the story as Fair Isle is cut-off by a storm and Perez has to call on his family and fiancee Fran to help his investigation [enough said, no spoilers here].So good so far, although I don't usually enjoy detective stories that are overly centred on the detective [and their family] and not on the detecting, in short I prefer detectives with a proper work-life balance, in this case I am prepared to make a bit of an exception and not dock a star because this series by Cleves is so good and "Blue Lightning" with its twists and turns, and unexpected final act is no exception. But coming after "Red Bones" and its focus on Sandy Wilson's family I'm hoping that in book 5 Cleves ditches some of the up-close and personal angle and Perez gets back to some good old fashioned uninvolved and unemotional detecting.

Well written as usual, this time set on Fair Isle even more isolated by a storm. The story begins with the murder of a renowned bird watcher who helps run a hostel and bird sanctuary; the big problem with such a plot is the lack of suspects and an obvious culprit owing to a lack of motive by everyone else. The ending is totally unwarranted and another example of an author’s cruelty to their investigators, I can only think of Wexford and Barnaby and those series are much better than this one.

The author has a great knack for creating a sense of place and building characters, but less so, on the evidence of this and the prior book in this series, for developing a convincing plot.The story in this book starts slowly following a murder investigation on remote Fair Isle. So far so good. But, after a second murder is committed the story falters. The third murder takes you by surprise - but not in a good way. It just doesn't make sense in the context of the book. I get the feeling that the author decided she needed that death to further develop the lead character of this series (Perez). So it got tacked onto the main story using the second murder as the tack. The denouement looking back at the reasons for the 3 murders makes sense for the first one but lacks conviction for the other killings. For example, we are told at the end of the book the killer wanted his identity to be discovered after the first murder. So why kill again to cover it up.I will read at least one more from this series because I enjoy the writing so much and I'm interested to see what happens now for Jimmy Perez. But, I hope the plot is better thought through.

Another good read from Ann Cleaves ~Shetland series.I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the previous books but it was still enjoyable and again i didn't guess the perpetrator!!The author manages to make detection interesting without submerging the reader in procedure.It's interesting mixture of story plus details of insights into life in the subarctic archipelago that is ~ShetlandThis far into the series i would have liked a little more detail of the conditions there and the weather which i know is pretty chillyJimmy Perez is not as endearing as Vera, another of her successful characters, I feel we never quite get the measure of the quiet man who seems to solve a mystery in a flash of inspiration.Worth following the seriesRecommended