Death comes to an island (again)

Well, I've now read the first of Ann Cleeves's mystery novels, called Raven Black. I think it's actually better than the second one, White Nights, which I liked very much (see Note of Aug. 22). For one thing, the murderer was more psychologically feasible, and came as more of a surprise. I'll admit to having had an intuitive flash of who the murderer was, early on in White Nights, based on the fact that the character seemed to serve no essential purpose in the story...but there he/she was. Must be there for a reason...(Would this qualify as a spoiler?)

There was no great satisfaction in being proved right with that book since, by the time the climax rolled around, too many deaths, and the reasons for them, had made it hard to swallow that the murderer was, indeed, the murderer. It's interesting that the author made this mistake (to my mind it was a mistake) in the second book of the series, but not the first. I'm hoping she doesn't go out on another psychological limb with her third culprit (I gather four books in all are planned for the series).

Cleeves did as good a job in Raven Black of rendering the people, the culture, the physical makeup of the Shetland Islands as she did in White Nights. In both books police inspector Jimmy Perez is a jewel of a character, very likable, not hard-boiled at all, but smart. He gets there. And while in White Nights we saw what folks of the Shetlands got up to in the summer, in Raven Black we see them celebrating the same kind of drunken New Year's Eve celebrated elsewhere in Scotland, and later involved in their own special celebration, Up Helly Aa, which celebrates the island's Viking heritage with a giant bonfire in which a full-sized replica Viking longboat is burned. All quite fascinating.

However, I do have to take issue with the publisher calling these books thrillers. They are intriguing, well-plotted mysteries, but the emphasis is on the characters, on their interactions with one another, and on their interior lives, not on heart-stopping action, on exciting adventures of the hero, often while tracking and/or being tracked by the bad guys. That's my idea of a thriller. Did they think the books wouldn't sell if they were just called "A Mystery"?

So...check 'em out.