I am a great fan of Ann Cleeves’ books – she’s probably most famous for her Shetland series with her detective,, Jimmy Perez. However, she has many other books to her name – and the first I read were many years ago, her Molly and George Palmer-Jones mysteries, and her Inspector Ramsey stories which were on the shelves of my local library. I devoured them all, long before Ann’s name was more widely known. As soon as her other books were published, I bought and read them too. I was very fortunate to hear a talk she gave at the St Endellion book festival a couple of years ago (unfortunately I was sitting at the back, behind a pillar in the church where she was speaking, so I could only glimpse her standing at the front.) If you do get a chance to see her at a live event, do go, she is so interesting and entertaining, and very friendly – I was particularly interested in what she said about writing, inspiration, characters and narrative.
I’ve read all her books and have enjoyed the Perez series on TV (although slightly miffed that Jimmy was blond and not dark as the books so clearly state – it’s part of his character being different in appearance from the native Shetlanders) I did not however, enjoy the series of ‘Vera’ although the books were excellent – once again the eponymous Vera, was totally miscast, great though Brenda Blethyn is and a talented actress. This is just my opinion of course, I’m sure others won’t agree!! In 2019, Ann published the first in a new series – the Two Rivers books, ‘starring’ DI Matthew Venn, played on TV by Ben Aldridge. I really enjoyed the series, I thought it was great and was very surprised there were so few episodes.
Today there was news from Ann, the important part for me is: The Dying Light will be published in the UK on October 8th. I’ll be touring, mostly in the Southwest around that date. We’ll share details soon, but the book is available for pre-order now – and the US edition will be out on 29th September.
It goes without saying that I have pre-ordered!
https://www.fantasticfiction.com/c/ann-cleeves/
Lois Elsden 