From the beginning I was pleased that this was a quartet of novels rather than a series. Although I’ve managed to read plenty of other series with an excessive number of murders for their location, four on on the Shetland Islands is really stretching credulity! I don’t doubt I would have carried on reading if there were more though. I have the impression that this set of books was conceived within it’s limited structure and I was rather expecting something to happen to close the story arc that was begun in Raven Black. And although I would have liked a happy ending, I can’t blame the author for choosing a Reichenbach Falls-ish ending.

The ending kind of overshadows the rest of the mystery though, which was a solid closed circle of suspects case, and is well worth reading in it’s own right.