Red Bones

Sometimes in a story every thing revolves around a central character whose actions seems to direct all other movement. Occasionally that pervasive influence is the weather.  Be it a fog or mist, a blizzard, tornado, torrential rain or heat wave it is Mother Nature that forces the situations and directs the action.

When fog is the weather element it sets a very specific mood. The inability to see things clearly and the danger inherent in the poor visibility create a sense of fear, of claustrophobia and a sense of helplessness.

 Red Bones by Ann Cleeves

The discovery of the body of an elderly woman on a mist-shrouded night is where this mystery began. Dense fog was not an uncommon event on Whalsay, one of the smaller Shetland Islands. Those misty incursions often covered the terrain so that only people very familiar with it could get around in it.

Sandy Wilson, at home for a visit on Whalsay was coming to visit his grandmother Mima in this dense haze to sober up a bit before going home to his parents house and at first he thinks that he sees a coat on the ground. He is dismayed and shocked to find it is his grandmother and when he brings her inside he realizes she has been shot.  Sandy is a policeman who works for Jimmy Perez of the Shetland police and he calls his boss knowing he has already disturbed the scene of the crime.

At first it seems that the shooter is a close friend of Sandy’s who was rabbit hunting but little details don’t add up and with in a few days there is another death.  Again the facts are hazy and hard to see clearly. The victim is a young girl, Hattie on the island doing an archeological dig on the island for her PHD. She and her assistant Sophie had made some finds that might lead to  greater future developments . This dig was abutting Mima’s croft and Hattie had become friends with her so the death of the old Islander affected her badly, in addition she had also been acting a little oddly herself recently. She has been afraid and worried.

In this mystery the mist may be a metaphor for haziness surrounding the cause of the two deaths. Murder, manslaughter, or freak accident are considered in the case of Mima, and the facts of murder or suicide in Hattie’s death are tossed back and forth and left unsettled.

Sophie says that once the fog rolls in you feel as if the outside world doesn’t matter at all. People here lose any sense of proportion. Tiny incidents that happened years ago fester and take over their lives.

The truth is that some of the incidents of the past were not so tiny. People on this little island were very active in the Norwegian resistance during WWII as part of what was known as the Shetland Bus. This involved crafting small boats that could get in and out of the fjords. Shetland, specifically Whalsay men delivered these boats across the North Sea. There are still some murky secrets about this time.

There is also a fog in Jimmy Perez’s mind as he frequently ruminates about his future with his girl friend Fran who is only peripherally present in this book. Repetitively he questions himself about what he wants, and what she will accept.

Jimmy in his quiet persistent way teases out the tangles and follows small wisps of information that lead him to the realization that while appearing close knit to an outsider, envy, distrust and enmity from old rivalries crept insidiously into the relationships of these Shetlanders and there were motives to murder.  As the mists and fogs disperse Jimmy also finds light being shed on the crimes he is being pushed to solve.

 

This is a slow burning story, much like the peat fires that warm the crofts of these desolate but beautiful places places. But no matter where you find them people are not so very different and while the ending is beautifully suited to the time and place, it would have worked as well in a Greek tragedy.