Book Review: Thin Air

Thin Air by Ann Cleeves

There’s nothing about the cover to tell potential readers that this book is actually sixth in a series, but in theory, that shouldn’t have mattered. It’s a mystery set in the Shetland islands, remote islands far north of Scotland. Some friends from England go up to celebrate the wedding of a college chum of theirs, and one of them turns up dead. There’s also a mystery of a young girl, Peerie Lizzie, who drowned a few generations earlier.

I often feel that the main point of mysteries is the character and setting. A mystery novel is as familiar as a sandwich, and should be a comforting framework in the background while the author entertains the reader with an exotic tour of a novel setting and its quirky personalities. In a way, it succeeded. It has some quirky characters and is set in a place I will likely never go. Did she paint a detailed portrait of the setting so clearly that I felt like I’d been visiting? Eh, no, not really. Maybe the first and the second books in the series were clearer. I just got some glimpses of seabirds and mist and a summer sun that never quite sets. It was okay, but not a 10/10 on evocation. I’m gonna guess the earlier ones in the series laid the groundwork and this was riding off of books I hadn’t read.

Some of the characters were very interesting and well done. Polly and Elizabeth were well-realized, as well as the couple who owned the large BNB. Grusche and George started out as interesting (more on this later) and I liked Elizabeth’s mother Cilla. Jamie and Willow, the main characters, seemed more like cameo appearances from a show I have never seen. They clearly have some history, and Jamie (Jesse?) has grief from a partner who died in an earlier book, but I didn’t get a good sense of them. Willow was nominally in charge of the investigation, but she seemed to continually defer to Jesse (Jamie? It’s been a couple days. I can’t remember his name). In the end, it’s Jamie who puts the whole thing together. If I’d been with these characters for five books, it probably would have been satisfying, but without the previous history, they were swimming in air.

I’m not fond of the plot. Elizabeth gets murdered straight off in a mysterious way, and then another person dies later. There’s a side plot with a girl who may or not be a ghost, and an artist who may or may not be descended from the girl blamed for the ghost-girl’s death. I guess I wanted the story to be revealed little by little, so that the complexity grew on me. Instead, it was baffling and opaque for 95% of the novel and then the explanation, when it came, was so fast and so contrived that it just confused me. I had to reread the same page three times and finally concluded that the details I wanted were simply missing. Like, how did the murderer physically contrive to murder the second person? How did they move the body? Why on earth was Polly involved? How did they get the ghost-girl to appear and disappear so easily? The ghost-girl plot was barely sketched in, when it could have been fascinating from a logistical point of view. That’s the kind of detail I love, the behind-the-scenes stage magic, and it was glossed over. The murderer was so implausible that it seemed like they picked them just because they seemed unlikely to murder people. Like “Ah ha! The reader will never guess this person did it!!!” The author tacked on a bunch of psychological defects as a supposed motive that frankly felt a little sexist. In a mystery novel, finding out whodunnit is supposed to be a big payoff, but for me it was like sitting through a dull tour because you’ve been promised a gift and finding out the gift is a laminated brochure or something.

Usually when I read a mystery novel, I’m just along for the ride and I don’t care too much about the reveal, but this ride didn’t have enough to draw me in, and the ending didn’t make up for it. If the setting and characters had been a bit more lavishly described, or if the ghost-girl plot had been fleshed out and revealed more gradually, it might have worked because I would have had something other than just the murder plot. As it was, I didn’t think the setting and characters were strong enough to make up for the disappointing plot. It’s not enough that I didn’t see it coming, it has to make complete sense to me and feel true. It felt like the murderer was randomly chosen and the author did yoga twists to find a motive while glossing over the logistics of how they actually achieved it.

If you’ve read the other books in the series, you might like it, but if you’re like me and you haven’t read the first ones to get invested in the setting and characters, this is probably not going to blow you out of the water. It’s only okay.




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