Cold Earth (Shetland #7) by Ann Cleeves ***
Reading dates: 22 May – 26 June 2021
Cold Earth is my seventh Shetland series read. Here they are in order:
After such a long investment in the characters and the landscape, Cold Earth is a comfort read. Aside from that, though, the case Jimmy, Willow and Sandy work on is not that interesting. I would say that the main thrust of the novel is the relation between Jimmy and Willow, as this perhaps sets up future plots. The characters don’t get developed very much and there is not the distinctness of place that I read in some of the other novels. While I like the play of elements (water, air, earth …) I wonder if more could have been done with the landslide that opens the book. There are some nice callbacks (which I won’t reveal as they would be spoilers) but in general the whole thing does not hang together very convincingly.
