Ninth in the Cass Lynch series and the books have matured so they are less about a murder mystery - though that is still part of it - and more about another fascinating glimpse into Shetland life. And into the life of our heroine Cass Lynch, jobbing sailor, in particular. It starts with a mayday from a ship in trouble on Shetland rocks and there is a thrilling sea-rescue at the three-quarters climax.
A hallmark of these Shetland Sailing Mysteries are the wonderful descriptions. These have been improving throughout the series and this book is full of them. I luxuriated in these descriptions; the two cited below are from chapter eight:
- "The water was lighter than the land, a pale grey-blue circle around us. There was a blue rim above the eastern hill, which gradually lightened to milky white, then flushed palest gold, darkening the hills below it to a black silhouette where every rock, every house roof and chimney, every telegraph pole, stood out sharp and clear against it. Now I could see the land reflections in the water. Slowly, much slower than in summer, the textures of the land became visible, the knobbled brown of heather and smooth grass, then the houses sharpened into focus, white against the green parks."
- "The first sun had come through at last, picking up the autumn colours on land, the chocolate hills, the rusty sword leaves of iris in the ditches, the tinted flowering currant bushes around the houses. The orange lobster buoys glowed on the water."
But also, perhaps for the first time in the series, this book contains some hard social commentary about the position of women relative to men through history and nowadays and the plight and exploitation of refugees.
Selected quotes:
- "She looked frail and delicate, but there was an iron paw inside every one of those little white mittens." (C 1)
- "It was a bonny day to be out, more summer than autumn, with the blue sky fretted with high cirrus, and the hills smooth green. Only the colour of the water betrayed the season, a cold steely-blue." (C 3)
- "Some US president had once said that you had the face you deserved by the time you were sixty." (C 4)
- "He had that straight-at-you look that I associated with someone telling me a lie." (C 5)
- "With the moon waning gibbous towards the neap-bringing crescent, every tide would be slightly lower than the one before" (C 7)
- "Mermaid’s eyes, I’d always thought, indifferent to human wants and failings. Every so often she tried to be chatty about furniture or flats, but I didn’t believe it; she lived in a cavern under water, hidden behind waving kelp, and when she walked on land each step was a knife stab." (C 12)
- "I’d come across some awkward customers in my time, but not many in whom violence simmered so close to the surface, like a shark in shallow water." (C 16)
- "The couch was a deep leather affair which was going to take serious leg muscles to get out of." (C 18)
- "Now I tell you straight, I thought he was as frank as a donkey moving backwards." (C 27)
- "The habit doesn’t make a monk." (C 27)
- "it’s like pedalling in semolina to get anything out of a bank." (C 27)
- "dumb enough to swallow snakes." (C 27)
This series gets better with every book. The books, in order, are:
- Death on a Longship
- The Trowie Mound Murders
- A Handful of Ash
- The Body in the Bracken
- Ghosts of the Vikings
- Death in Shetland Waters
- Death on a Shetland Isle
- Death from a Shetland Cliff
- The Shetland Sea Murders
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