Familiar face in a new place

English mystery author Ann Cleeves has, over her forty-odd year career, developed a devoted following through her various series and characters.  (American readers have the added bonus of getting Cleeves’ earliest series, Inspector Ramsay and the George and Molly Palmer-Jones books, published for the first time stateside this spring.) Cleeves’ Shetland series, featuring Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez, gained particular interest for its evocative Scottish isle setting, thoughtfully written central character and a successful BBC adaptation. When Cleeves closed the series with 2018’s Wild Fire, it seemed that was the last of Perez and his tricky navigation of small island life and homicide. 

But Cleeves seems to have had a change of heart, as Jimmy Perez returns in The Killing Stones this fall. It’s several years after the events of Wild Fire; no spoilers to say that Jimmy and his love (and boss) Willow Reeves, have moved south to Orkney mainland with their son James, and another baby on the way. Willow now supervises Scotland’s police force in the isles, and Jimmy has finally found a measure of peace with his new family and new home after the trauma of his Shetland period, when he lost his fiancée in a stabbing. That peace is threatened one December evening when Jimmy receives a call that his oldest friend is missing on a neighboring island. Amid a winter gale, Jimmy finds his body near an archeological dig, his head bashed in with Norse inscribed story stone from the local museum. While it soon becomes clear that Archie’s relationship with a local Englishwoman was the subject of much gossip, would it have been enough to justify bludgeoning the man to death? Was there any significance in using the story stone, inscribed as the bringer of death? And why do a couple of visiting historians seem so keen on avoiding Jimmy and Willow’s questions about their relationship to the stones? Another death further clouds the case, and Jimmy realizes that his close connection to all the suspects could compromise whatever evidence he might uncover—that is, if he could find anything that could point to one or another. If he did, could he bear the thought that his friend was killed by someone equally close to his family?

All the hallmarks that fans enjoyed in the Shetland series are revisited on Jimmy’s new patch. Like the northern isles, Orkney has its own lore and history that might be several centuries removed from today but remains inescapably present in present lives. Even with a bigger population than Shetland, Jimmy and Willow know that the islanders’ insularity has the contradiction of protecting their secrets while seemingly knowing everyone’s business. Cleeves’ depiction of Jimmy’s struggle to investigate potential suspects who also happen to be his friends, especially now that he’s finally gained some level of equilibrium with Willow, is the best part of The Killing Stones. Cleeves fans will be especially thrilled to see a favorite character return, and mystery readers who enjoy character driven crime will find much to like here. The Killing Stones might be read as a standalone, but for the full Perez effect, start with the first Shetland book, Raven Black.