White Nights (Shetland 2)

Author/Guide: Ann Cleeves

Why a Booktrail?

2000s: No one puts Shetland on the map like Ann Cleeves and her depiction of North Mavine – for her fictional setting of Biddista is no exception

ISBN: 978-0330448253
Genre: Crime

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What you need to know before your trail

Artist Bella Sinclair throws a party to launch an exhibition of her work and to introduce the paintings of Fran Hunter. The Herring House, the gallery where the exhibition is held, is on the beach at Biddista, in the remote north west of the island. However, then a mysterious Englishman bursts into tears claiming to have lost his memory and to have forgotten his name. The next day he’s found hanging in the boathouse with a clown’s mask on his face.

Detective Jimmy Perez is convinced that this is a local murder. A second murder only reinforces this belief. But the detective’s relationship with Fran Hunter clouds his judgement. And this is a crazy time of the year when night blurs into day and nothing is quite as it seems.

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Travel Guide

White nights on Shetland – when birds sing at midnight and the sun never sets.

Locals apparently speak of the Summer Dim since it never really gets dark in the summer and so it looks as if someone has dimmed the lights. This can make for some wonderful eerie coloured skies. There are many paintings done of the island and Jimmy Perez’s girlfriend is displaying her work at the local art centre (modelled on the Bonhoga centre and converted mill near Weisdale)

The landscape is remote and shadows are every where. Yet despite this the scenery is still stunning – inspires books…

“I love Shetland. I’m hoping to make a more permanent arrangement, I’ve vague ideas of writing a fantasy series based around Viking mythology. It might work, don’t you think? And it would be wonderful to have the landscape to set it in”

No wonder Peter Wilding decides to buy a house around Maywick and why Perez feels so close to his homeland –

“Perez was a Shetlander, His family had lived on the island since the sixteenth century, but there was no Viking blood in him. An ancestor had been washed ashore after the wreck of a ship from the Armada. At least that was the story he told.”