White Nights is intricate and engrossing, offering readers the pleasures of the traditional locked room/isolated island mystery.
—The Washington Post

In Dagger-winner Cleeves's uneven second installment in her Shetland Island quartet (after Raven Black), Insp. Jimmy Perez sees a stranger sobbing in front of a painting at an art exhibit featuring the work of Perez's new girlfriend, Fran Hunter, and mythic local painter Bella Sinclair. Claiming to be suffering from amnesia, the unknown man disappears before Perez can question him further, but turns up dead that same night, hanged in a fishing shed. In his investigation, Perez focuses on Bella, whose talent is matched by her penchant for drama and extravagant parties. When another body turns up, Perez must sift through generations of closely guarded island secrets to find the truth. Despite characters as vivid as those in Raven Black, Cleeves struggles to sustain a suspenseful plot, which slows to a crawl in the middle and packs too much action at the end. Still, this slight misstep shouldn't deter fans of the introspective Perez from looking forward to Cleeves's next thriller. (Sept.)

Village murders unveil lives far from simple in this second installment in a quartette of Shetland thrillers by Cleeves (Raven Black, 2007, etc.). Summer does not becalm the Shetland island villagers of Lerwick and Biddista. White nights, when darkness at this high northern latitude becomes a brief, passing shadow, roil sleep, leaving folks restless and edgy. Cleeves finds them tossing and turning, contemplating love lost and, perhaps someday, love regained. Tensions rise at an exhibit of local art at the Herring House, a gallery owned by wealthy, flamboyant and intimidating Bella Sinclair. Looking at some of the paintings, a distraught stranger falls to his knees weeping. Speaking to island inspector Jimmy Perez, the man claims not to know his name or his reason for coming to the island. The next morning, a villager finds the visitor in a shed, hanged, a clown mask on his face. Perez suspects, and a doctor confirms, the man did not commit suicide but was murdered. Perez brings onto the case Roy Taylor, a senior investigator from Inverness. But Perez constantly upstages Taylor, tracking apparent leads with his native's instinct for village life. Did the murder have anything to do with the unsolved disappearance of a man's brother? Was the motive bitterness over an affair? Or anger over a harsh critique of a painting? Likely as these motives seem, they fail to link the murdered outsider to the tangled histories of four local families. Perez is further confounded when someone discovers at the shoreline the lifeless body of Roddy Sinclair, his head smashed against a boulder. Was Roddy, Bella's manipulative nephew and a fiddler with a rock star's fame, part of the imbroglio confronting Perez?The detective's answer cuts deep. Cleeves's keen sense of the seasonal rhythms of Shetland life and her vivid descriptions of its terrain satisfy like a peaty Highland dram, sipped slowly. Agent: Sara Menguc Literary Agent

Gripping from start to finish.” —Booklist

“Intricate and engrossing . . . offers readers the pleasures of the traditional locked room/isolated island mystery.” —The Washington Post Book World

“A most satisfying mystery. Jimmy Perez is a fine creation.” —Peter Robinson, author of Friend of the Devil