Caroline, Eleanor, and Polly have been best friends since university. Caroline, strong-willed and strong-limbed, has just married a Shetlander and invited her friends and their partners to a celebration on the island. Beautiful Eleanor, a film director, brings her strong silent husband Ian along. Polly, a shy and emotionally fragile librarian, brings her world-traveling boyfriend. The two couples rent a house on the edge of the water, planning to make a week-long holiday of the event. Shortly after the party, Eleanor is dead and both locals and visitors alike are suspects. In true Christie fashion, Cleeves once more pulls the wool over our eyes with cunning and conviction." —Colin Dexter, author of the Inspector Morse series The flow of the book works from beginning to end and I honestly didn't put this one down until the murderer was revealed.

When Eleanor goes missing, Sandy Wilson, Jimmy Perez, and Willow Reeves jumpstart the investigation, Jimmy proving to be Willow’s reference point in these harsh northern islands. As the investigation fans out to encompass Eleanor’s murder, Cleeves's deft hand is clearly seen inThin Air” takes place 6 months after the events in the last book, “Dead Water”. We follow Inspector Jimmy Perez as he is called away to help find a missing woman who was in Shetland for a wedding party. Many people think that the English woman is just missing, but when she is found murdered, Jimmy, Sandy, and Willow have to find out who wanted the woman dead and why.

The judging panel consisted of Geoff Bradley (non-voting Chair), Lyn Brown MP (a committee member on the London Libraries service), Frances Gray (an academic who writes about and teaches courses on modern crime fiction), Heather O'Donoghue (academic, linguist, crime fiction reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, and keen reader of all crime fiction) and Barry Forshaw (reviewer and editor of Crime Time magazine).

Willow finds herself thinking of Jimmy in a different way in this one, and I can see where the wind is blowing there. But I like that it didn’t take precedence over the actual mystery. Thin Air" takes place 6 months after the events in the last book, "Dead Water". We follow Inspector Jimmy Perez as he is called away to help find a missing woman who was in Shetland for a wedding party. Many people think that the English woman is just missing, but when she is found murdered, Jimmy, Sandy, and Willow have to find out who wanted the woman dead and why. 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. It's hard to believe that such gruesome murders are being committed in this isolated, beautiful setting where the weather-beaten locals and their hardscrabble existences are tenuously linked to the tourist dollars from big-city dwellers. In this landscape, certain inhabitants conspire to protect their children from the evils of visitors, hiding behind a veneer of small-island regularity. There are suspects of all types - from a woman called Monica, at first a hurriedly scribbled name in Eleanor’s notebook, to Grusche and George Malcolmason, Lowrie parents who spend an inordinate amount of time obsessing over their son. Even now, George, a retired lighthouse keeper, remains a mystery, sometimes strongwilled and always hiding the truth from Jimmy even at the risk of being charged with murder. Her relationship with the archipelago began in 1975, when she took a job as assistant cook at the Fair Isle bird observatory. On Fair Isle Ann met her late husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist, and it was on a return trip that a single stark image provided inspiration for her first Shetland novel.

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. Thin Air” is very well done, with a plot that takes us around and amongst the islands, leading us down one path to another, with very good twists along the way. Cleeves is a wonderful writer and one who should be on any mystery-reader’s list. The Shetland Islands breed some very unusual folks, not surprising really when the daylight lasts well into the night and every time you want go somewhere you have to catch a ferry. It's a very different kind of life style. Interestingly, when a body is found in a field it is left there for hours (with a police guard of course) while the necessary officials travel by plane or ferry from the nearest hub to investigate.Her last Shetland book Wild Fire was published in September 2018. Ann has a long association with Shetland and confesses to being in love with the place.

a b c Lobb, Adrian (19 March 2013). "Ann Cleeves interview for Shetland". The Telegraph . Retrieved 24 May 2016. The missing woman was part of 2 couples who travelled from London to see one of their friends marry an island man. The women have known each other since uni so you'd think they had no secrets between them. You'd be wrong. These novels, except for The Glass Room, have been dramatized in the television series Vera on ITV, which stars Brenda Blethyn in the title role. The programme premiered in May 2011. 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.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. Joanne Butcher (8 July 2014). "Vera writer Ann Cleeves gains honour from University of Sunderland - The Journal". journallive. Archived from the original on 23 September 2019 . Retrieved 24 May 2016. 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.