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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 823.914
EAN num: 9780312384333
ISBN number: 0312384335
Label: St. Martin's Minotaur
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Minotaur
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 400
Printing Date: September 16, 2008
Publishing house: St. Martin's Minotaur
Release Date: September 16, 2008
Sale Popularity Level: 25130
Studio: St. Martin's Minotaur
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Product Description:
The electrifying follow up to the award-winning Raven Black
Raven Black received crime fiction’s highest monetary honor, the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award. Now Detective Jimmy Perez is back in an electrifying sequel.
It’s midsummer in the Shetland Islands, the time of the white nights, when birds sing at midnight and the sun never sets. Artist Bella Sinclair throws an elaborate party to launch an exhibition of her work at The Herring House, a gallery on the beach.
The party ends in farce when one the guests, a mysterious Englishman, bursts into tears and claims not to know who he is or where he’s come from. The following day the Englishman is found hanging from a rafter, and Detective Jimmy Perez is convinced that the man has been murdered. He is reinforced in this belief when Roddy, Bella’s musician nephew, is murdered, too.
But the detective’s relationship with Fran Hunter may have clouded his judgment, for this is a crazy time of the year when night blurs into day and nothing is quite as it seems.
A stunning second installment in the acclaimed Shetland Island Quartet, White Nights is sure to garner American raves for international sensation Ann Cleeves.
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Rated by buyers 
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This is the second novel in a projected Shetland Islands Quartet, succeeding Cleeves's award winning "Raven Black." Again the lead character is Jimmy Perez, the local detective inspector. An unknown Englishman seemingly collapses into weeping at the opening of a Shetland art exhibition. When Jimmy takes him in tow, he has no identification and claims total amnesia. The subsequent day his body is found hung in a fishing hut on a nearby jetty. A seeming suicide is soon identified as murder. This brings highly aggressive Detective Chief Inspector Roy Taylour to Lerwick from Inverness to lead the investigation, just as he did in "Raven Black."
The two cops could not be more different, but both play a part in solving the crimes. Taylour is abrasive and abrupt. Perez is unfailingly polite and gains information through patient inquiry, exploring relationships as he goes.
And relationships are at the heart of this book. The stories emerge from them: Relationships among the characters, relationships from the past affecting the present, even relationships between the people and the land itself. The nature of the relationships is determined, almost predetermined, by the deepest natures of the characters involved. Vanity, pride, ego and fear certainly play their parts, but love and its close cousin desire, thwarted, spurned and fulfilled, are what drive events. The crimes and their solutions are the natural outcomes of the relationships.
The writing here is as low key as Perez, quiet and almost gentle as it moves the story along to its devastating conclusion. The characters are realistic and well drawn, quite believable and convincing in every respect. If you like slam-bang crime novels with gunfire echoing on the page, this is not for you. But if you want a novel that explores how what is human in all of us can sometimes produce evil, and then explores its devastating consequences, you can't do better than this.
Rated by buyers -
This is the second of the four Shetland Island books. I blue Raven Black first, which held me spell bound until I finished it in one sitting while on vacation in Maine in late summer. White Nights was just as good.
Rated by buyers 
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"White Nights" is the second in what the author calls her "Shetland Island Quartet" and that is a grand thing. Grand because now I know I can go back and read the very first in the series, Raven Black, and still have two more to book forward to in the future. Excellent!
Police Detective Inspector Jimmy Perez and his friend, Fran Hunter are about to go to an art showing at a local gallery in the town of Biddista. For Perez, he hopes this will be the chance to find out if their relationship will move beyond friendship in the future, for Fran, the very first gallery showing of her art. But things are not to go smoothly. Few people show up for the show, a bizarre stranger causes a scene, and the subsequent morning, the same man is found dead, hanging in a storage building on the beach. Although there was an endeavor to make it look otherwise, the death was certainly murder and all the people connected with the small seaside community are suspect in the investigation, carried on by Perez and later, the Inverness police team brought in, headed by Inspector Roy Taylor.
The atmosphere of the book is engaging. Summer in the islands, because of the latitude, has only a few hours of dusty night each day and the constant light is said to have a crazy effect on people. Combine that with the constant presence of the sea, the treeless windswept hills, dotted with sheep, the fog off shore, always threatening to roll in once again, and the Shetlands themselves are almost like another character in the story.
Not to say that the characters themselves are not very good, because they are. Yes, it is a small community where many people are related and, if not, have often known each others all their lives. They think that they know everything about their neighbors but it turns out everyone, the locals and the outsiders alike, have their secrets. And those secrets are yet to take another great toll on the townsfolk.
This was a fine book, an excellent setting, very good characters, large and small, a engaging story and a very good read. I would certainly recommend it to mystery fans and I know I will be searching out more of Ann Cleeves books.
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