Detectives Jimmy Perez and Willow Reeves are dispatched to Unst to investigate. Before she went missing, Eleanor claimed to have seen the ghost of a local child who drowned in the 1920s. Her interest in the ghost had seemed unhealthy – obsessive, even – to her friends: an indication of a troubled mind. But Jimmy and Willow are convinced that there is more to Eleanor’s death than they first thought.

Is there a secret that lies behind the myth? One so shocking that someone would kill – many years later – to protect?

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.

The first chapter follows here.

Chapter One

The music started. A single chord played on fiddle and accordion, a breathless moment of silence when the scene was fixed in Polly’s head like a photograph, and then the Meoness community hall was jumping. Polly had spent thirteen hours on the overnight boat from Aberdeen to Lerwick and when she’d first come ashore the ground had seemed to shift under her feet, and this was another kind of illusion. The music appeared to bounce from the walls and the floor and to push people towards the centre of the room, to lift them onto their feet. Even the home-made bunting and the balloons strung from the rafters seemed to dance. The band’s rhythm set toes tapping and heads nodding. Children in party clothes clapped and elderly relatives clambered from their chairs to join in. A young mother jiggled a baby on her knee. Lowrie took the hand of his new bride, Caroline, and led her onto the dance floor to show her off to his family once more.

This was the hamefarin’. Lowrie was a Shetlander, and after years of courtship Caroline had finally persuaded him, or bullied him, to marry her. The real wedding had taken place close to Caroline’s home in Kent and her two closest friends had followed her to Unst, Shetland’s most northerly island, to complete the celebration. And they’d brought their men with them.

‘Doesn’t she look gorgeous?’ It was Eleanor, crouching beside Polly’s chair.

The two women had known Caroline since they were students; she was their voice of reason and their sister-in-arms. They’d been her bridesmaids in Kent and now they were dressed up again in the cream silk dresses they’d chosen together in London. They’d made the trek north to be part of the hamefarin’. They’d followed Caroline round the room for the bridal march and now they admired again her elegance, her poise, and her very expensive frock.

‘It’s what she’s wanted since she first laid eyes on Lowrie during Freshers’ Week,’ Eleanor went on. ‘It was obvious even then that she’d get her way. She’s a determined lady, our Caroline.’

‘Lowrie doesn’t seem to mind too much. He hasn’t stopped beaming since they got married.’