I'm going to throw the blurb in here. It's much more descriptive than I can make it. And please, humor me, and fall in love with the beautiful cover too, like I did.

Six friends - three couples - come to Shetland. One set, Lowrie and Calorine, to celebrate their marriage (or the like). Then Caroline's two best friends, Polly and Eleanor, and their partners. Eleanor has her own production company is intending to make a documentary about a local ghost story - sightings of a child that drowned many years ago. Polly and Eleanor both claim to have seen the ghost after a walk on the beach. Then one night, Eleanor gets murdered. Jimmy Perez and Willow investigate. It's the usual claustrophobic island life investigation into dirty family secrets. I really enjoyed this one. I think it was because the mystery in this one at least made better sense than the last one. It wasn't great either, but there were clues there that you could follow in retrospect after you got to the end. Ann Cleeves' striking new Shetland novel explores the tensions between tradition and modernity that lie deep at the heart of a community, and how events from the past can have devastating effects on the present.It also means, in this series, that the resolution at the end is lengthy and complex, and sometimes stretches credibility a little more than more direct mystery solutions. A difficult mystery to work out, as usual with the series. That’s enjoyable of course,as mystery readers enjoy being mentally engaged in the puzzle throughout the book and needing to work for it. Unfortunately after the party, one of the English girls is found murdered. Who could have murdered the outsider is the question of the novel. The local myth of Perrie Lizzie, a young girl found drowned many years ago plays a part in the mystery. Has the young girl appeared as a ghost and a participant in the murder?

Sandy kind of came into his own in this one I thought. We get to see an old love of his, but he is also wondering about the death of a young girl from about 70 years ago and how it can tie into this case now. For the National Year of Reading, Ann was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. It came as a revelation 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. So Jimmy is doing much better in this book, it's been a year since he lost Fran and he is working cases. The fact that he is able to leave Cassie with her father for some over nights says a lot about how much he has loosened up. He still has pain over Fran, but is trying to be better and make sure Cassie sees her grandparents.

That can be both interesting and a little less satisfying in an ending that you’d like to finally relax into, saying, ah, of course, I get it. Instead you work at processing the complex revelations all the way to the end. There are a couple of bodies in Thin Air and a whole lot of mystery surrounding them. There are ghostly sightings and people keeping secrets and not much chance, for me anyway, of guessing the murderer. There were lots of possibles and I was convinced by one of the author's red herrings into suspecting the wrong person entirely. I am obviously in the mood for light, relaxing reads, and this one, a murder mystery with a touch of suspense and a pinch of ghostliness was a great experience. Four friends -- two couples -- have come to Unst, the most northern of the Shetland Islands, to help a friend celebrate her wedding to a native of the island. The same night as the celebration, one of the four vanishes, leaving behind a text message that reads like a suicide note. The body is found the next day, with Inspector Perez and Chief Inspector Willow Reeves called to handle the investigation.