Cold Earth
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4.3 • 169 Ratings
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
A body is found in the wreckage of a destroyed home. Consumed by the investigation, Inspector Jimmy Perez struggles for the truth in Cold Earth, the seventh Shetland mystery from Ann Cleeves.
In the black days of a Shetland winter, torrential rain triggers a landslide that crosses the main road and sweeps down to the sea.
At the burial of his old friend Magnus Tait, Inspector Jimmy Perez watches the flood of peaty water and mud smash through a croft house in its path. Everyone thinks the croft is uninhabited, but in the wreckage he finds the body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress. Perez becomes obsessed with finding out her identity and what she was doing there.
Then it emerges that she was already dead when the landslide hit the house and, suddenly, Perez finds himself with a murder to solve . . .
Now a major BBC One drama, Shetland, starring Douglas Henshall.
Continue the atmospheric crime series with Wild Fire, the final Shetland novel.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The ground shifts in more ways than one for Det. Insp. Jimmy Perez in CWA Diamond Dagger winner Cleeves's moody seventh Shetland mystery (after 2016's Thin Air). At the funeral of old Magnus Tait, who was once accused of murder, the rain-soaked hillside above the mourners gives way and nearly buries them under a massive landslide. No one at the cemetery is hurt, but the body of a woman in a red dress is discovered in the ruins of a house on the hill, and no one seems to know who she is. Jimmy's obsession with uncovering her identity only deepens when he learns that she was murdered before the landslide occurred. The Scottish oil boom brings many outlanders to the island, but Jimmy suspects the killer is someone close to home and sets about unraveling a tangled web of relationships among the locals. The stark Shetland landscape provides an atmospheric backdrop for Cleeves's complex, relatable characters, especially Perez, a kind man dealing with his own tragic past.
