Planning our family holiday to Shetland earlier this year, I was aware only of one set of novels set in this far-flung archipelago, closer to Norway than Scotland. I also thought I knew lots about Shetland (ponies, knitting, lots of fog). Like a blurry image becoming crystal-clear, my time there showed me I knew less than I thought. Intrigued by the off islands, I read up on their populations, history and geography and briefly wondered how the residents of Papa Stour to the west of Shetland, all stacks, caves and towering cliffs, lived their lives. There are around fifteen inhabitants, connected to the mainland by a boat and a small airstrip.
The Shetland Sea Murders by Marsali Taylor
The Shetland Sea Murders is the ninth in the series of Shetland Sailing Mysteries by Marsali Taylor. The protagonist is feisty Cass Lynch who sails her beloved boat Khalida around Shetland, stumbling across mystery and murder along the way. The author weaves dialect and local landmarks into her prose and helpfully includes an index at the end for soothmoothers (those not from Shetland).
The novel takes a clever device as its premise. Cass and her crew have been chartered by local cheeky chappie Stevie Shearer, as a birthday trip with his sister and two nieces. The three crew and four passengers are aboard the Swan, a rescued Fifie fishing boat, cruising around the rocky outcrops of Papa Stour and destined for a stay on the tiny island for the music weekend. His sister and nieces used to live on a hippy colony on Papa and Stevie himself, all terrible dad jokes and slightly creepy bonhomie, is perhaps not quite what he seems.
The boat receives an SOS from a fishing boat, the Dorabella, stuck on jagged rocks off Ve Skerries, by Papa Stour. Taylor uses a clever narrative device. With so few characters on such a tiny, remote island where everyone knows everyone else, the sense of fear and mystery can be built up to fever pitch.
Marsali Taylor
Uncle Stevie is clearly not a nice man. Cass overhears his nieces, Moon and Sky, talking about what could be historical child abuse involving another little girl on the island. Sky (aka Kirsten, desperately clinging to a respectable job at the local council) wants Moon to forget all about it, just as she has. All is not as it seems and the author foreshadows the mayhem to come with clever use of language.
“I didn’t much like the darkness myself. The two torch beams only emphasised the utter blackness of rock walls and water. I’d never been afraid of depths but these inky waves made me think of what lay beneath them, more sharp-toothed conger eels, and tentacled octopus, and dead things rotting”.
It's not too long before Moon falls over the edge of the boat while they’re exploring a sea cave. She’s pulled back into the boat, but warning bells are sounding. Meantime, on the quayside, doughty Shetland wife Betty (mother of Geordie, one of the Swan’s crew) is waiting to tie the boat up. Why is her face corrugated with fury beneath her flowery headscarf? To whom is she referring when she hisses, “You need to come at once. You and Kenny. I’ve said nothing to Jen. We need to speak about what we’re going to do about him. He’s got to be made to go.”
“He”, it turns out, is the new tenant in a cottage owned by Geordie’s in-laws. He’s calling himself Paul Roberts, but it turns out he’s Geordie’s father, back from the big city with a name change. He used to run the hippy community and then married Betty and proceeded to lead her a merry dance with coercive control and domestic violence being dished out. I was expecting to stumble over his corpse at some point in the next few chapters, but instead, the author wrong-footed me by having Betty stumble across her son-in-law Kenny’s lifeless body by the phone box. Then Moon fell to her death off a cliff during a day trip to neighbouring Foula, another off-island.
Cass sees lights on the Dorabella and follows dark figures over the island to find out what’s really going on. Child sex abuse and domestic violence bubble away quietly underneath an apparently placid island community. Cass is also getting ready to move in with her police officer boyfriend and wondering how the relationship will go. There are frequent references to delicious meals and snacks which made my stomach rumble as I read. Bannocks, lentil soup, toasted cheese, homemade fish soup – make sure you’ve eaten well before you pick up this novel!
There is more evocative descriptive language from the author as in this musing from Jen, the widowed pregnant mother thinking about her violent father. “The father’d had made her childhood miserable was back, squatting like a toad in the middle of their island, and there was nothing legal to be done about it, he couldn’t be turned out.”
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The plot thickens as Cass creeps around the island, overhearing whispers and eavesdropping on mysterious conversations. Sticking to the usual murder mystery formula, Cass herself is put in mortal danger when someone dives under her boat and cuts the mooring rope, leaving her drifting towards the savage rocks of Ve Skerries.
Will Cass survive? Who bashed Kenny over the head and chucked Moon off a cliff? What is the real secret of the Dorabella? And perhaps my biggest question of all. What other novelist would include a policeman fishing an evidence bag out of his sporran?
There’s plenty of girl power in this fizzing read; strong women making it through life against all the odds and enough maritime description to satisfy even the most devoted of sailing fanatics. I put the book down knowing a good deal more about Shetland than when I picked it up, and you can’t say fairer than that.
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You can find out more about Marsali on her website and Twitter.