Cold Earth

The seventh Shetland novel

The darkest secrets are buried deepest . . .

In the black days of a Shetland winter, torrential rain triggers a landslide that crosses the main road and sweeps down to the sea.

At the burial of his old friend Magnus Tait, Jimmy Perez watches the flood of peaty water and mud smash through a croft house in its path. Everyone thinks the croft is uninhabited, but in the wreckage he finds the body of a dark-haired woman wearing a red silk dress. Perez becomes obsessed with finding out her identity and what she was doing there.

Then it emerges that she was already dead when the landslide hit the house and Perez finds himself with a murder investigation to solve.

Cold Earth is the seventh book in Ann Cleeves’ bestselling Shetland series – a major BBC One drama, starring Douglas Henshall.

About the Author

Ann Cleeves is the creator of popular detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez, who can now be found on television in ITV’s Vera and BBC One’s Shetland. The Long Call, the start of her new Two Rivers series featuring Devonian Matthew Venn, has received critical acclaim and the series is also being adapted for television. She has written over thirty novels, which have sold over a million copies worldwide, and in 2017 she was awarded the highest accolade in crime writing, the CWA Diamond Dagger.

Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of ‘Murder Squad’, working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. She lives in North Tyneside near where the Vera books are set.