Interdisciplinary Book and Film Reviews

  White Nights    Shetland Series Book 2 by Ann Cleeves There’s been a party in Shetland during those white nights when the light of day fades into a long, twilight evening, known as the simmer dim. Fran Hunter joins flamboyant Shetland artist Bella Sinclair in an art show. A strange man garner’s everyone’s attention as he falls before one of Bella’s paintings. Later, someone finds him hanging in a shed where fishermen store their gear. Local DI Jimmy Perez starts to investigate the staged suicide as a murder. The team includes lead DI Englishman Roy Taylor from the Inverness office and local sergeant Sandy Wilson. The tension increases in the small village of Biddista when another one is murdered. As is her style, Ann Cleeves describes her characters partly through point-of-view narratives and partly by contrasts between the Shetlanders, the tourists, and mostly English incomers as well as their interaction with the stark Shetland landscape. The lead characters are enriched as we

               Scotland’s Northern Isles Geoffrey W. Sutton   The Shetland series is set in the Shetland Islands, which are at the far north of the United Kingdom. The stark landscape dotted with sheep, filled by the author with an intriguing variety of birdlife, and battered by storms seems like an ideal place for a series of murders especially when cold winters bring snow, dense fogs can obscure vision, and summers present with an eerie long evening light—the simmer dim. The lead detective is Jimmy Perez who was born on Fair Isle but works out of the police station in Lerwick on the main island. Jimmy had been married to Sarah who divorced him following a miscarriage. His team includes Sandy Wilson from the off island of Walsay and inspectors from elsewhere in Scotland. In the first story, Raven Black , we meet Fran Hunter who is divorced from Jimmy’s old school friend, Duncan Hunter. They have a daughter Cassie. The relationship between Jimmy and Fran progresses along w