Customer Reviews

Blue Lightning: A Thriller (Shetland Island Thrillers)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

The setting is remote, Fair Isle a rocky stretch of land in the Shetland Islands, where avid birdwatchers and naturalists gather. Angela Moore, warden of the Fair Isle field centre, is married to the much older Maurice Parry, a spouse who heartily supports his wife's stellar accomplishments. Angela is quite a celebrity in this rarified world, with a best-selling book and frequent appearances on television as an expert in her field. Beautiful and ambitious, Angela demands perfection from those who inhabit her kingdom, indulging in small cruelties when it pleases her. The Fair Isle field centre is a serious enterprise, but filled with the sounds of celebration at the engagement party of local Jimmy Perez, a detective, and his fiancé, Fran. Taking a break from work, Jimmy introduces Fran to his parents, proud of the talented and witty artist with whom he has fallen in love.

The engagement party is a welcome diversion from petty competition among birdwatchers, but the festivities end abruptly with the discovery of a murder. As a storm rages, access to the island is cut off, Perez the only law enforcement official available. Until facts prove otherwise, the detective must consider everyone a suspect. Fair Isle is the lair of dedicated birdwatchers and naturalists: "They're all obsessive, these birdwatchers. They come across an area of research and dig away at it." Passion runs deep with this group, secrets buried under the guise of common interests, one of them driven to murder. The relative quiet of the naturalists' pursuits shattered by unexpected bursts of violence, Perez longs for a few hours of seclusion with his fiancé, ordered to lead the investigation until backup arrives.

Jimmy's one-on-one interviews expose the cracks in Angela's stellar reputation, the number of potential suspects increasing exponentially. Fran's uncomplicated support is the only relief for the beleaguered Jimmy. In an absolutely stunning denouement, no one is completely innocent, not even Perez, as facts collide, a ruthless killer revealed. While I might have wished for a glossary of common terms for birdwatchers, there was no escaping the author's deft exploration of the duplicity of human nature and the deadly seeds of revenge. Luan Gaines/2010.

I was fast becoming an Anne Cleeves fan having read the first two thrillers of the Shetland Island Series, Raven Black and White Nights. But after having read the third book in the series, I wish I hadn't read the first fwo.

Anne Cleeves has the talent to draw the reader into close relationships with her characters, so much so, I found the ending of Blue Lightening gut wrenching. If she has anymore suprises such as the one in this book, I doubt if I will read any more of her books no matter how well they are written.

As I was reading some of the reviews, I wondered if they had read the same book I had. I found this book so good that it surprised me not once, not twice but three times. I was shocked at some of the choices the author made and really hope she decides to extend the series. I found the bird watching information really helpful to the story. I had never thought of the bird watching community having stars but it just goes to show you that every world has its own. I highly recommend this book.

The Book Report: Jimmy and Fran go to visit Jimmy's parents, Big James and Mary, on Fair Isle, since they're planning to be married. Big James and Mary make a nice engagement party for the happy couple at the North Light, which now serves as the centerpiece of a birding reserve and research center. Maurice and Angela, who run the reserve, have attracted the best chef *ever* in the form of Jane, a lesbian escapee from life's more hectic and less forgiving pace in London. Throw in some birders, a weird subspecies of Homo obsessivus, a misery of a teenaged daughter, a snotty young upperclass Brit-twit, and some genuinely surprising revelations about the families and lives of the characters we who are fans have come to love, and then...drumroll please...kill off an extremely main character for absolutely avoidable reasons and throw the entire cast of characters into a major tumult, and you have book four of the Shetland Islands Quartet.

My Review: Oh, owww. I thought Lousy Louise Penny had hurt me as badly as a novelist could with her perfidious, horrible, and completely unforgiven emotional drubbing in book 5 of Three Pines. I suppose I should have been on the alert for a similar anguishing event because Lousy Louise herself blurbed this book. I was, however, all padded up in cotton wool, interestedly following Jimmy around his hometown Fair Isle, meeting and tutting over the characters who are slated to die; I had my murderer all picked out (I was right) and I was practically *drooling* with eagerness to see my candidate suffer, be blamed, pay for a horrible crime, a forgivable one too though honestly had the first murder gone unpunished I wouldn't've been even a little fussed about it; and then *BLAMMO* right between the eyes, *smash* went the skull with a twist I did NOT see coming; and then, and then...! Cleeves kicked me square in the teeth with the ending!!

I cried. I was very upset. I felt I'd been hurt in my real life. It takes a good, good storyteller to make that happen.

These are well-written books, and they convey a clear sense of life in the Shetland Islands. They're very much worth reading on that basis alone. But Cleeves creates characters that are deeply real, ones you can invest in, and that's the most important quality a writer can have. I strongly recommend the books. This one, obviously, should be saved for last; I suspect, though, given the last few lines of the book, that Cleeves's publishers have prevailed upon her to make the Quartet more open-ended. I am not at all sure I think that's a good thing, if it's true. Still, I hope you will go and procure them for your reading pleasure, because it will be a pleasure.

This is number four in Ann Cleeves' Shetland Island/Jimmy Perez series, and though the quality of the writing is still very good, the eclectic plot and stunning ending are not going to please every reader. The story has Jimmy Perez and his fiance Fran returning to Fair Isle--the smallest and most remote of the Shetland Islands--to spend pre-wedding time with his parents. In the first 24 hours of the homecoming, the young and promiscuous director of the island's bird and nature center is murdered and Jimmy is back on the job until an investigatory team from the mainland is able to get to Fair Isle. As he sorts through the suspects, a second murder occurs. This one is more baffling and tragic in some ways than the first. As Perez closes in on the killer, he finds his own family directly involved and in the story's final moments cannot prevent a third and most shocking killing from taking place.

As always, author Cleeves weaves some very interesting references to the natural setting of Fair Isle, and in this book in particular, she goes to town with wonderful details about the bird life that the island is known for and about the people who are drawn to birding. The juxtaposition of the beauties and dangers of nature in the Shetlands and personal struggles and intrigues of the humans living there is one of the great strengths of this series.

While I liked "Blue Lightning" and really do think it's a good read, there were elements of it that detracted from its overall impact. A minor one is the title which has no real import for the story line. A second was making one of the secondary characters a lead narrator of the action and then suddenly eliminating her from the story without plausible explanation until the last pages of the novel. The book's ending involves a shocking event--as mentioned--but I don't think that the motive for that event bears up to reader scrutiny when the final page is turned.

In the final analysis, I thought this was an intelligent book with enough originality and action to make it an above average crime novel/police procedural. I will continue to read anything this author has published.

This book is very disappointing. If you are reading the series, I recommend you stop at book 3. If you haven't started the series, you may want to skip it. It was a lazy book, with an unimaginative ending. It was a slog from about 2 or 3 chapters in (and, once I reached the end, OH! how I wished I'd stopped slogging and just given up!) The investigation in this book was sloppy and amateurish. If this is a mystery novel, and the protagonist a detective, you would not know it from some fairly glaring mistakes along the way. This is the first Amazon review I've written, but I just found it very important to say a piece on this.

Police Detective Jimmy Perez brings his English fiancée Fran Hunter to his home on Fair Isle to meet his parents and the other residents. A welcoming fete is thrown, but at a bird observatory, someone stabs a woman with a knife to her back and leaving feathers in her hair.

The deceased is a famous BBC ornithologist Angela, alleged guardian of the island's bird sanctuary. Perez realizes the victim was universally disliked by those who knew her; even perhaps her husband Maurice. Suspects are numerous ranging from a myriad of lovers, her stepdaughter, her employee and the bird lovers' crowd. Perez struggles on his own due to a hurricane cutting off the island from the mainland. At the same time just before the storm hit, there is an influx of bird watchers due to a rare avian finding. As Perez digs deeper and Fran tries to help her beloved though he pleads with her not to get involved, he fears a tie to his family.

The final Shetland Island police procedural (see Red Bones, Raven Black and White Nights) is a super whodunit. The story line focuses beyond just Jimmy's investigation and relationship with his fiancée, as the murder haunts the small community although the victim is loathed by anyone who met her. Jimmy is great as he is cut off from professional help, but though he detests what he is finding, he resolutely stays the course. With a final twist that will stun fans, The Shetland Island saga is a terrific series and hopefully will have more colorful Fair Isle mysteries.

Harriet Klausner

I liked Ann Cleeves' other books much more than this one, although I enjoyed the inside view of the birdwatchers' world and the descriptions of Fair Isle.
Jimmy Perez' ongoing self-doubts got old and he began to come across as sort of whiny and neurotic and also, at points, as just NOT doing his job well. I found the book frustrating reading at points, and also, the ending was miserable. I'm disinclined to read a follow-up based on the final paragraphs of this book.

If you pick this book up you will be spending time with a writer who: cannot do dialogue well (silence passes for syllables); whose descriptions leave you confused; whose improbable police interviews are maddening in their incompetence; whose important plot points are thrown inexcusably into the last few chapters; and whose characters are, with one exception and that exception is killed off, people nobody of any sense or sensibility would want to spend time with. They are arrogant, self-absorbed, stupid, obtuse, uncaring, avaricious, shallow, venial, dull, self-pitying, too weak to be believed, boring, a liar, a cheater, a betrayer, a pathetic cuckhold -- every one of them "victims" of someone else's bad attitude or abuse. It is a flat sort of prose to be subjected to, as if the author did not know how to build climaxes. Also, the book should have had a map for I completely lost the crucial knowledge of where the various places were located.

In the end, the only character worth knowing is needlessly and uselessly murdered, a character who had no tie to the murder plot or the people involved in the murder plot. There is nothing remotely uplifting about the story or any of the characters. By the time you have turned the last page you will be feeling unbearably low, all the joy sucked from your soul. It smacks of reader abuse. I honestly don't know how Cleeves survived the writing of this book. Murdering the best in you is a bit like suicide.

There was no need to end this story this way. If I want a good cry, I will read an aga saga. These characters deserved a better ending.