Red Bones (Shetland Quartet 3)

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’
    Globe and Mail

 
    RED BONES
     
    Ann Cleeves worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She now promotes reading for Kirklees Libraries and as Harrogate Crime-Writing Festival’s reader in residence, and is also a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger for Best Crime Novel, for Raven Black . Ann lives in North Tyneside. Red Bones is the third novel in the Shetland series following from Raven Black and White Nights . The fourth, Blue Lightning is available now.
    Visit the author’s website at:
    www.anncleeves.com

 
    Also by Ann Cleeves
    A Bird in the Hand
    Come Death and High Water
    Murder in Paradise
    A Prey to Murder
    A Lesson in Dying
    Murder in My Backyard
    A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy
    Another Man’s Poison
    Killjoy
    The Mill on the Shore
    Sea Fever
    The Healers
    High Island Blues
    The Baby-Snatcher
    The Sleeping and the Dead
    Burial of Ghosts
    The Vera Stanhope series
    The Crow Trap
    Telling Tales
    Hidden Depths
    The Shetland series
    Raven Black
    White Nights
    Blue Lightning

 
Acknowledgements
     
    Whalsay is a real island and one of the friendliest places I know. It doesn’t have a community called Lindby and all the people and places described there – including the camping bod where the students live – are fictitious. Symbister exists – it’s where the ferry arrives – but it doesn’t have a Pier House Hotel.
    Lots of people helped with the writing of this book, but despite the collective expertise there are probably mistakes; they’re all mine. I’m grateful to Anna Williams and Helen Savage for their advice on archaeology, and to Cathy Batt and her colleagues at the University of Bradford for talking me through the Shetland excavations and showing me real red bones. Val