Audio book. Listened to this on my way to and from work. I couldn’t work out if I liked this book or really hated it. Its an interesting mixed bag of annoying texts and subtexts. First the good parts, I liked the setting, the author did a lovely job of capturing life in Shetland, and the fishbowl of island life where “everybody knows everybody else’s business, or thinks they do.” And she’s a good writer, she puts words together well, in a way that unfolds easily without being too confusing, which is no easy task in a story with a large cast of characters. The things I hate are all a bit meta. I felt like the author had clearly had a bad experience in Scotland at some point. The plot is the story of two dead girls, killed a decade or more apart, the contemporary murder is a teenage girl from England who has moved to Shetland. She decides to make a film for a school project about how small minded, nasty and bigoted Shetland is, and gets the chop for her trouble. The historic murder is a young girl, who disappeared ten years before and her body was never found. The suspect is presumed to be the same local pervert who was never charged with the historic offence. Now the meta part comes with the resolution, it turns out both girls were murdered by other, different, women. It’s the same weird misogyny of Murder She Wrote, where a disproportionate number of the killers were women. Whereas in reality, women who kill are pretty unusual comparatively. Add that unlikely fact to the setting, an archipeago of remote islands with a population of about 22,000 people in total, and the chances of having two women murderered by other women feel vanishingly small, to the point of implausibility. The second meta point is the author, a woman from England, writing a story about the small minded bigots of Shetland murdering a young woman from England feels a bit heady and on the nose.
All in all I found it tiresome. But maybe I’m in a funny mood.
