When they went outside to see Sandy off Perez gasped with the cold. There was a moon and the sea was silver. The beam from the lighthouse on Raven Head swept across the fields between the beach and Fran’s house. It was hypnotic, he felt he could stand here for hours just watching it. He forced himself to look up at the sky instead. There were no streetlights here and the stars were clear and sharp. Fran stood in front of him and he put her arms around his waist. Even through his thick jacket he could feel her body pressed against his.

Sandy’s taxi drove off, but still they stood there.

‘My friends in the city can never understand what this is like,’ Fran said. ‘I explain: no light pollution, no sound, but they can’t conceive it.’

‘You’ll have to invite them up and show them.’

She turned towards him. At first her face was in shadow, then she tipped up her head so the moonlight caught her eyes.

‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘that we could ask them to the wedding.’

Praise for the Shetland series

RED BONES

‘Ann Cleeves’ fellow crime fiction practitioners (from Colin Dexter to Peter Robinson) have been lining up to sing her praises, and it’s unlikely that there will be any blip in that chorus of praise on the evidence of Red Bones, which is quite as assured and entertaining as its predecessors’

Barry Forshaw

‘On an island shrouded in mist, amid a community with secrets, a visiting archaeologist uncovers mysterious human remains . . . This award-winning writer weaves an intriguing, chilling web’

Best Magazine

WHITE NIGHTS

‘Decades-old amorous betrayals resurface in a plot that makes much of the tension between incomers and islanders. Ann Cleeves’ intriguing mystery is tangentially energized by the “simmer dim”’

Financial Times

‘Cleeves deftly paints in the personalities and their relationships, as the police inquiries disrupt the close-knit community. It’s a good, character-led mystery, which displays the art of storytelling without recourse to slash and grab’

Sunday Telegraph

‘This is wonderful . . . Part of the wonder of this book is the domestic detail that becomes iconic within the novel . . . This is a very good author. This is an author that bears criticism’

Radio Four’s ‘Front Row’

RAVEN BLACK

‘Raven Black breaks the conventional mould of British crime-writing, while retaining the traditional virtues of strong narrative and careful plotting’

Independent

‘Beautifully constructed . . . a lively and surprising addition to a genre that once seemed moribund’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Raven Black shows what a fine writer Cleeves is . . . an accomplished and thoughtful book’

Sunday Telegraph

‘Ann’s characterization is worthy of the best writers in the field . . . Rarely has a sense of place been so evocatively conveyed in a crime novel’

Daily Express

‘A fine and sinister psychological novel in the Barbara Vine style. Cleeves is part of a new generation of superior British writers who put refreshing new spins and twist on the old forms’