Ann Cleeves
Ann Cleeves grew up in the country, first in Herefordshire, then in North Devon. Her father was a village school teacher. After dropping out of university she took a number of temporary jobs - child care officer, women's refuge leader, bird observatory cook, auxiliary coastguard - before going back to college and training to be a probation officer.
While she was cooking in the Bird Observatory on Fair Isle, she met her husband Tim, a visiting ornithologist. She was attracted less by the ornithology than the bottle of malt whisky she saw in his rucksack when she showed him his room. Soon after they married, Tim was appointed as warden of Hilbre, a tiny tidal island nature reserve in the Dee Estuary. They were the only residents, there was no mains electricity or water and access to the mainland was at low tide across the shore. If a person's not heavily into birds - and Ann isn't - there's not much to do on Hilbre and that was when she started writing.
In 1987 Tim, Ann and their two daughters moved to Northumberland and the north east provides the inspiration for many of her subsequent titles. Although they had to move away for Tim's work, in the autumn of 2006 they finally achieved their ambition of moving back to the North East.
For the National Year of Reading, Ann was made reader-in-residence for three library authorities. It came as a revelation that it was possible to get paid for talking to readers about books! She went on to set up reading groups in prisons as part of the Inside Books project, became Cheltenham Literature Festival's first reader-in-residence and works as associate trainer with the reader development organisation Opening the Book. Now she is reader-in-residence for Harrogate Crime Writing Festival. Her reading passion is crime in translation.
Ann's short film for Border TV, Catching Birds, won a Royal Television Society Award. She has twice been short listed for a CWA Dagger Award - once for her short story The Plater, and the following year for the Dagger in the Library award. In 2006 she won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for best crime novel of the year for Raven Black, the first volume of her Shetland Quartet.
Ann writes:
“Blue Lightning, the final novel in the Shetland Quartet will be published in the UK in February 2010 to conicide with the paperback edition of Red Bones. The new B format jacket designs look stunning and I'm looking forward to seeing them all on the shelves. Blue Lightning will be published in the US in the autumn of 2010 and Red Bones was Publishers' Weekly pick of the week there. Overseas publication continues to grow and in the last year my agent has added Portugal and Brazil to our list of territories. The German language radio adaption of Raven Black has been broadcast on three channels.
The most exciting event of the year has been the filming of Hidden Depths by ITV Productions under the title Vera. Brenda Blethyn stars as Vera Stanhope, and absolutely captures the spirit of the character. Gina McKee, David Leon and Juliet Aubrey feature too. Paul Rutman adapted the book with sensitivity and wit and with fingers crossed we've been discussing future projects. I've been fortunate enough to be included in the process throughout and have just spent a day freezing on set. It will be shown Autumn 2010. Raven Black has been adapted for BBC radio and will be a Saturday afternoon drama on Radio 4 at the end of January.
The award-winning Shetland fiddle player Chris Stout has found some inspiration in my books - he's written a new theme for Roddy Sinclair (a charismatic young fiddler from Shetland who appears in the second novel in the Quartet...) and will call his new CD White Nights. We've put together an evening of stories and music and will be appearing in Gateshead and Holmfirth soon. Early next year I'm doing a short tour of Devon and Cornwall, a series of gigs in the north east with thriller writer David Hewson, and of course I'll be back at CrimeFest. I'm hoping to get to the US to promote Blue Lightning too.”
Website: www.anncleeves.com
A hot summer on the Northumberland coast, and Julie Armstrong arrives home from a night out to find her son murdered. Luke has been strangled, laid out in a bath of water and covered with wild flowers.
This stylized murder scene has Inspector Vera Stanhope and her team intrigued. But then a second body - that of beautiful young teacher Lily Marsh - is discovered laid out in a rock pool, the water strewn with flowers. Now, Vera must work quickly to find this dramatist, this killer who is making art out of death.
Clues are slow to emerge from those who had known Luke and Lily, but Vera soon finds herself drawn towards the curious group of friends who discovered Lily's body. What unites these four men and one woman? Are they really the close-knit, trustworthy unit they claim to be? As local residents are forced to share their private lives and those of their loved ones, sinister secrets are slowly unearthed.
And all the while the killer remains in their midst, waiting for an opportunity to prepare another beautiful, watery grave ...
Hidden Depths (Pan Macmillan, first published: February 2007) ISBN 978-1-4050-5473-7
Buy from Amazon: hardback.
Red Bones, the third instalment of Ann Cleeves' Shetland Quartet, is set in spring: a time of rebirth and celebration. And a time of death... for April is the cruelest month. When a young archaeologist discovers a set of human remains, the island community is intrigued. Is it an ancient find - or a more contemporary mystery? Then an elderly woman is shot on her land in a tragic accident, and Jimmy Perez is called in by her grandson, his own colleague Sandy Wilson. He finds two feuding families whose envy, greed and bitterness has divided the surrounding community. With Fran in London, and surrounded by people he doesn't know and a community he has no links with, Jimmy finds himself out of his depth. Then another woman dies, and as the spring weather shrouds the island in claustrophobic mists, the two deaths remain shrouded in mystery.
Red Bones was published in the UK on 20th February 2009 it is available from Amazon, or order it from any bookshop, quoting the ISBN: 978-0-230-01446-6.
A Charnwood Large Print edition was also published on September 1st.
The paperback edition will be published in February 2010.
Hear Ann talking about Red Bones - and other things - in a podcast on the Pan Macmillan web site.
Shetland Detective Jimmy Perez knows it will be a difficult homecoming when he returns to the Fair Isles to introduce his fiancée, Fran, to his parents. It’s a community where everyone knows each other, and strangers, while welcomed, are still viewed with a degree of mistrust.
Challenging to live on at the best of times, with the autumn storms raging, the island feels cut off from the rest of the world. Trapped, tension is high and tempers become frayed. Enough to drive someone to murder...
When a woman's body is discovered at the renowned Fair Isles bird observatory, with feathers threaded through her hair, the islanders react with fear and anger. With no support from the mainland and only Fran to help him - Jimmy has to investigate the old-fashioned way. He soon realizes that this is no crime of passion - but a murder of cold and calculated intention.
With no way off the island until the storms abate - Jimmy knows he has to work quickly. There's a killer on the island just waiting for the opportunity to strike again...
Blue Lightning will be published in the UK by Pan MacMillan on February 5th 2010. It is already available for advance order from Amazon, or can be ordered from any bookshop, quoting the ISBN: 9780230014473.
For Lizzie Bartholomew, a holiday in Morocco will change life forever. But not in the way she had hoped... Lizzie had planned her trip to Marrakech as the perfect escape from her life - and her nightmares - in Northumberland. Abandoned as a baby, and having spent her childhood moving between foster homes, Lizzie certainly has much to escape from. And for Lizzie, Morocco is the exotic paradise that she had imagined. Especially when she finds herself on a bus sitting next to a fellow tourist, who is also travelling to fulfil his dreams.
After a brief affair, Lizzie returns to England. In the days that follow, she is distracted by thoughts of her mysterious lover, hoping against hope that Philip might come and find her. But suddenly she receives a letter from a firm of solicitors. Philip Samson has died. In his will, he has left Lizzie a gift of £15,000. But there are conditions attached to this unexpected legacy, conditions that will alter the course of Lizzie's life forever...
(Pan Macmillan, first published: March 2003) ISBN 978-0-330-41175-2
Buy from Amazon: paperback or hardback or large print.
Bibliography
Shetland Quartet:
Blue Ligtning (2010)
Red Bones (2009)
White Nights (2008)
Raven Black (2006)
Vera Stanhope:
Hidden Depths (2007)
Telling Tales (2005)
The Crow Trap (1999)
Stand-alones
Burial of Ghosts (2003)
The Sleeping and the Dead (2001)
The Inspector Ramsay books:
The Baby Snatcher (1997)
The Healers (1995)
Killjoy (1993)
A Day in the Death of Dorothea Cassidy (1992)
Murder in My Backyard (1991)
A Lesson in Dying (1990)
The George and Molly Books:
High Island Blues (1996)
The Mill on the Shore (1994)
Sea Fever (1993)
Another Man's Poison (1992)
A Prey to Murder (1989)
A Bird in the Hand (1986)
