Review: Vivien Horler

The Killing Stones, by Ann Cleeves (Macmillan)

This detective thriller is subtitled The Return of Jimmy Perez. I didn’t realise he’d been away, but I think I may have missed a novel in the Perez series, since he has now left the Shetlands and is living in the Orkneys.

Not only that – he has a partner, Willow, another cop who is pregnant and on maternity leave, and a four-year-old son, James.

The Orkneys, I discover when I look at a map, are closer to mainland Scotland than the Shetlands, where Jimmy was born, and are more fertile and a little less wild and windswept.

But nasty winter storms can blow up, even there, and it is on such a wild night that Archie Stout, a farmer on Westray, goes missing. Archie is a distant cousin of Jimmy’s – they frequently stayed together as boys and feel as close as brothers.

So when Jimmy – who lives on the archipelago’s main island, Mainland, hears Archie is missing, he wants to reach Westray urgently, despite the storm. He gets the lifeboat men to ferry him to the island, and joins the search for the man who is beloved on the island as a fiddle player and sociable fellow.

It doesn’t take Jimmy long to find Archie’s body near an old archaeological dig. He appears to have been bludgeoned with a brick-sized stone – not just any stone, a carved Neolithic stone, one of a pair recently been stolen from the museum.

By the next morning the storm has subsided, and Jimmy’s team come over on the ferry from Mainland.

This frees up Jimmy to interview Archie’s wife, Vaila, something he is reluctant to do since she feels like family.

When he gets to the farmhouse he takes off his boots in the porch and lets himself into the kitchen. It would  have been odd to knock, he thinks, and yet, since he’s calling on Vaila in his official capacity, maybe he should have.

In a case like this senior officers from Glasgow would usually be sent to take over the case, and this is what Jimmy expects. But while the weather becomes milder in the Orkneys over the next couple of weeks in the run-up to Christmas, bitter wintry conditions settle over mainland Scotland, meaning the mainland cops can’t travel – leaving Jimmy in charge.

Various people saw Archie the day he was killed – he had chopped up an old fence and delivered wood to a number of households. In some he was offered tea, in others a dram, and sociable Archie always accepted.

But several people tell Jimmy Archie had seemed preoccupied. We, the readers, know he was. Because the book opens with Archie, who has arranged to have a drink with his mates in Westray’s hotel, waiting on a stormy headland to meet someone.

And while he’s waiting he’s thinking about the problem that has been troubling him all day. It isn’t something he can discuss with Vaila. He would have talked to his father Magnus, were he still alive, but he’s not.

Jimmy, he thinks, he’ll ring Jimmy in the morning. Then he sees a light bobbing towards him through the rain and wind. As the figure approaches, Archie shines a light into its face, and says: “Ah, it’s you.”

The obvious suspect in the case is a television archaeologist called Tony Johnson. He’s a bit of a celebrity, knows the history of Westray, and once brought a film crew to the island.

But it turns out he has appropriated a lot of Magnus’s research – Magnus after all being just a local farmer and unlikely to protest, especially now he’s dead.

There are others, however,  who are determined to defend Magnus’s legacy, accusing Johnson of career-ending plagiarism.

Then another body turns up.

As with all the Jimmy Perez books, this is a great addition to the canon. Archaeology, islands, local cuture – and a good puzzle solved.