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• the only mystery series set in Shetland, and Ann spends time on the islands to write with authenticity

  5.00 out of 5

  fordbarbara

• A very well written suspense novel that will leave you guessing until the very end. Love the depiction of Scotland and could really feel the isolation of the island life.

  5.00 out of 5

  andsoitgoes

• There are two facts I must convey to you before reviewing the book. One: I am extremely uncomfortable, to the point of pain, around people with cognitive and/or communicative disorders or inabilities. Two: I was the object of my pedophile mother's sexual interest until I was fifteen.Unsurprisingly, these aren't the sorts of themes I find enjoyable to find in my leisure reading. "Raven Black" has both! I was thinking seriously of abandoning the read, just quietly taking the book back to the library and forgetting it existed. Cleeves managed to make that an undesirable option, and in doing so, made it possible for me to hold a very unflattering mirror up to my character.The younger of my two grandsons is autistic. It is extremely hard for his mother to cope with the demands of two active, intelligent, communicative children plus an active, intelligent, uncommunicative one. I don't know how she does it. I would be incapable of doing one-third what she does, with (at long last) support and help from her (second) husband.Magnus Tait, one of our POV characters, is cognitively impaired. It was *horrible* for me to read the sections of text told from his POV because I could not bear to be in this close contact with him. It made me think of the helpless inability I feel when confronted with my autistic grandson...that sense of having nothing of myself to offer, of withdrawal from avoidable contact...no one can tell me the boy isn't aware of it, and while Magnus isn't autistic, it was a close-enough situation, and to know from the inside what chill and distance feels like...well, how awful, how awful to know it, feel it, and be unable to *understand* it.At least I understand. But funnily enough, that fails to make it better. It makes it worse.Pedophilia is present in several characters, no spoilers so no names, and the object of desire's POV is used in the story as well. It's unbelieveable to me that Cleeves can recreate the unmixed-but-unsettled feelings of a child who holds that kind of intoxicating, terrifying, inappropriate power over an adult. I hope not, for her sake, but I felt "takes one to know one" so many times in reading certain parts of the book.The thriller aspects of the book were nicely done, though as an old hand I pegged the murderer and motive fairly early on...but, discomfittingly, I found that I wanted the truth not to be what I knew, but what my prejudices drooled over.I recommend this book to the unsqueamish. It's strong stuff. Nothing that happens in it is gratuitous. The guilty, and I mean those morally guilty, are punished severely. There is a bleak pleasure in that.

  4.50 out of 5

  richardderus

• The body of a teenager is found near the home of a somewhat "slow" man named Magnus Tait who is widely believed to have murdered another teen eight years earlier although no convincing proof was never found and he was never charged. Inspector Jimmy Perez uses his knowledge of the locals as he and the investigators from the mainland set out to discover who is responsible for both murders.Just about everyone in the book had some motive or opportunity to have murdered the young girl. The conclusion of this book was completely unexpected to me as I had never seriously considered this person a suspect. Cleeves is a great writer, and I look forward to reading <i>White Nights</i> in the near future.

  4.50 out of 5

  thornton37814

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