Blue Lightning: A Thriller (Shetland Island Mysteries, 4) Paperback – October 25, 2011

Blue Lightning: A Thriller (Shetland Book 4) Kindle Edition by veteran British mystery author Ann Cleeves. Cleeves, who might once have been considered obscure, now finds herself in an enviable position: her Shetland series, starring Douglas Henshall, is airing as a great hit on Britain’s BBC, which attracted over 12 million viewers in its first two nights on the air. And her Vera series is airing as a great hit on Britain’s ITV. And both series are great hits on America’s PBS.In the book at hand, Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez takes his fiancé Fran home to Fair Isle, one of the tiny islands off Scotland, mysterious, dark and beautiful, known as the Shetlands, that he comes from, to meet his parents. The island happens to be a magnet for bird watchers, who congregate at the local inn and lighthouse. Angela, the warden of the Fair Isle Field Center, the island’s bird observatory center, a very attractive celebrity scientist, who had an eye for the lads, is murdered. In his investigation, Perez uncovers a nest of complicated relationships, petty academic rivalries. Perez also discovers that some of the suspects may be very close to him indeed. The stormy weather adds to the general gloom as more bodies pile up.Cleeves grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, BIRD OBSERVATORY COOK-- fancy that! –an auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.While Cleeves was cooking in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, she met her husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist. She was attracted less by the ornithology than the bottle of malt whisky she saw in his rucksack when she showed him his room. Soon after they married, Tim was appointed warden of Hilbre, a tiny tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary. They were the only residents, there was no electricity or water provided, access to the mainland was at low tide across the shore. If a person's not heavily into birds - and Cleeves wasn't - there's not much to do on Hilbre. So she started writing. Her first series of crime novels features the elderly naturalist, George Palmer-Jones. A couple of these books are said by those familiar with them to be seriously dreadful.For Britain’s National Year of Reading, Cleeves was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. It came as a revelation to her that it was possible to get paid for talking to readers about books. She went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the Inside Books project, became Cheltenham Literature Festival's first reader-in-residence and still enjoys working with libraries. Cleeves' short film for Border TV, Catching Birds, won a Royal Television Society Award. She has twice been short listed for a CWA Dagger Award - once for her short story The Plater, and the following year for the Dagger in the Library award.In 2006 Cleeves was the first winner of the prestigious Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award of the Crime Writers' Association, for Raven Black, the first volume of her Shetland Quartet. That win was worth £20,000 to her, the richest prize given for detective fiction. The success was announced at the 2006 Dagger Awards ceremony at the Waldorf Hilton, in London's Aldwych, on Thursday June 29, 2006. She said: "I have never won anything before in my life, so it was a complete shock - but lovely of course.. The evening was relatively relaxing because I'd lost my voice and knew that even if the unexpected happened there was physically no way I could utter a word. So I wouldn't have to give a speech. My editor was deputed to do it!" Cleeves’ books have been translated into sixteen languages: she's also a bestseller in Scandinavia and Germany. Her novels sell widely and to critical acclaim in the United States. Raven Black was shortlisted for the Martin Beck award for best translated crime novel in Sweden in 2006.Cleeves writes a good thriller, of course. Her narrative, descriptive and dialog writing is about as good as it gets. She gives us not only Fair Isle on the page, but all its birds, too. This book is a variant on the locked-room mystery, and a very good one indeed. In fact, the pages kept turning kind of breathlessly for me as Perez worked his way through his limited pool of suspects, throwing up one red herring after another. Love both her televised series, nice to finally read one of the books they’re based on, get an appreciation of just how good a writer she is.

This is number four in Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island/Jimmy Perez series, and though the quality of the writing is still very good, the eclectic plot and stunning ending are not going to please every reader. The story has Jimmy Perez and his fiance Fran returning to Fair Isle--the smallest and most remote of the Shetland Islands--to spend pre-wedding time with his parents. In the first 24 hours of the homecoming, the young and promiscuous director of the island's bird and nature center is murdered and Jimmy is back on the job until an investigatory team from the mainland is able to get to Fair Isle. As he sorts through the suspects, a second murder occurs. This one is more baffling and tragic in some ways than the first. As Perez closes in on the killer, he finds his own family directly involved and in the story's final moments cannot prevent a third and most shocking killing from taking place.As always, author Cleeves weaves some very interesting references to the natural setting of Fair Isle, and in this book in particular, she goes to town with wonderful details about the bird life that the island is known for and about the people who are drawn to birding. The juxtaposition of the beauties and dangers of nature in the Shetlands and personal struggles and intrigues of the humans living there is one of the great strengths of this series.While I liked "Blue Lightning" and really do think it's a good read, there were elements of it that detracted from its overall impact. A minor one is the title which has no real import for the story line. A second was making one of the secondary characters a lead narrator of the action and then suddenly eliminating her from the story without plausible explanation until the last pages of the novel. The book's ending involves a shocking event--as mentioned--but I don't think that the motive for that event bears up to reader scrutiny when the final page is turned.In the final analysis, I thought this was an intelligent book with enough originality and action to make it an above average crime novel/police procedural. I will continue to read anything this author has published.

BLUE LIGHTNING by Ann Cleeves is the 4th title in her SHETLAND series.Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez is visiting his home island of Fair Isle with his finance, Fran Hunter. When a murder occurs at the Field Center after Jimmy and Fran’s engagement party, Jimmy must take charge of the investigation.Fair Isle seems to be a mecca for twitchers (bird-watchers) and the Field Center is where collecting, banding and identifying different bird species takes place. The Field Center also offers some accommodations for twitchers and the Center staff. Bird-watchers ‘flock’ here in the hopes of observing bird species and discovering a new species to add to their ‘lifelist’.Two women from the Field Center wind up being murdered and Fran wants to help Jimmy with the investigation - with dire consequences.Adjectives describing BLUE LIGHTNING include: atmospheric; subtle; intensely suspenseful; incredible domestic detail and many-layered characters.I want to keep reading and dissecting the characters layer by layer in order to see the secrets being peeled away.One of the more interesting details of the book was Jimmy confronting his father, James, about a suspected infidelity and how this tied in with one of the murders.The plot, the writing, the mystery - superb. I had trouble taking a break from reading.The human characters, however, are almost incidental to the Shetland Islands and the birds that live and visit there.This is an extremely interesting and detailed book on all levels.