Finally gone and done it - and a heartfelt plea to authors!

Well I've finally gone and done it ......... I've bought a Sony Reader.

Why? Because I needed cheering up, with at best months and months of horrible medical treatments in front of me and at worst - we won't go in to that.

The result? I'm very happy with the reader - so lightweight, portable, easy to use - and with an adjustable font size so I never need to use reading glasses. I can hold it and turn the pages in either hand which makes reading in bed so much easier too. I can sit in the garden in bright sunlight reading it with no problem.

But I'm sadly disappointed at the lack of crime fiction ebooks available for us in the UK. It's hard work finding the ones I want, and I've had limited success so far. Part of the problem is that I have narrow requirements: specific authors and specific titles.

What I desperately want to be able to read and can't at the moment:

Louise Penny: two earlier Three Pines mysteries: Still Life (not UK) and Dead Cold
Ann Cleeves: Red Bones
Natasha Cooper: A Poisoned Mind

And so many more!

What I'm looking forward to buying on 28th April:

Yrsa Sigurdardottir: My Soul To Take (from HarperCollins US site)

What I've read on my Sony Reader so far:

Henning Mankell: Before The Frosts (mostly enjoyable)
Kate Summerscale: Confessions of Mr Whicher (engrossing)
Margaret Moore: Tuscan Termination (annoying)
Asa Larsson: The Blood Spilt (loved)
C.J.Sansom: Revelations (currently)

So, a heartfelt plea: authors, PLEASE ask your publishers to release your new titles as ebooks for us in the UK, and harry them to make available as many of your back catalogue as possible too!

UK: News - Ann Cleeves's Vera Stanhope on TV?

I was delighted to discover today there is a strong possibility that the Vera Stanhope novels of Ann Cleeves might be televised, beginning with Hidden Depths (See here for more about Vera and the location of the stories.) There's more information about the possible ITV production in Ann Cleeves's web diary - apparently the scriptwriter has been up to Northumberland to look round 'Vera-land' and his on his second draft.

In the light of my previous post on the Shetland Isles I must also be sure to look out for Ann's short story, to be broadcast in the 3.30pm story slot on Radio 4 in April, set in Shetland and featuring Detective Jimmy Perez. There's also a link on her website to an interview about Red Bones, the third in the Shetland Quartet, which is published next week.

This is all excellent news. I wonder who will be cast as Vera? I've put some suggestions in the poll to the right - if you've got other ideas, please post them below!

Shetland Isles: Beating the chill with 'White Nights' by Ann Cleeves.

It's summertime in Shetland and the sun never sets: during those white nights it seems like everyone goes a little crazy.

A stranger falls to his knees weeping in front of one of the pictures at the opening of a glamorous art exhibition. The man then disappears after claiming to Detective Jimmy Perez – attending the launch with one of the artists, Fran Hunter – that he is suffering from amnesia, only to be found dead the next morning.

White Nights is the second to be published in Ann Cleeves's Shetland Quartet of stories. The first, Raven Black, was released in 2006 to much acclaim, and White Nights followed in 2008. Over the last few days I've thoroughly enjoyed immersing myself in a warm Shetland summer: the book is an engrossing puzzle that kept me guessing right until the very end, and has sympathetic characters I liked spending time with.

The story is focused on the isolated settlement of Biddista, a fictional location on the northwest coast of Shetland's main island. The village comprises little more than a few cottages and crofts, a manse where world-famous artist Bella Sinclair lives and an art gallery and restaurant called the Herring House, converted from a building that once dried fish. Ann Cleeves based the arts centre on the real Bonhoga Gallery at Weisdale Mill, a former grain mill housing Shetland's premier gallery showing local, national and international exhibitions of art and craft, plus a coffee shop, and famous throughout the islands.

The author herself provides a most helpful map on her website giving the general location of the first three books in the quartet.

Though part of the British Isles, the Shetlands are in fact 130 miles north of the Scottish mainland (12 hours by ferry, which is why the detectives from HQ in Inverness prefer to fly!). Shetland is further north than Oslo in Norway, Stockholm in Sweden, and even Moscow, and Lerwick is as close to Bergen in Norway as it is to Inverness and Aberdeen. The Shetland Isles are much further north than they usually look on a map of the British Isles, as they tend to be scrunched up in a box in the top right-hand corner with the distances not to scale.

Travel to the Shetlands is either by ferry from Aberdeen to Lerwick, or by flying from one of the major Scottish cities to Sumburgh in the south of the main island. The distance and lack of direct communications to many places on the mainland cause problems for Inspectors Taylor and Perez in their investigations. Cruise ships visit Shetland during the summer months, docking in Lerwick for a few days and offering various trips around the islands to their passengers, and it is with one of these that White Nights begins.

The Shetland Tourist Board are of course keen to encourage visitors and have been very supportive of author Ann Cleeves as she explains in her blog on the launch of White Nights at a gallery in Bloomsbury last April. Ann herself talks about living in the Shetlands for two years in the 1970s in this article for The Times.

The next in the series, Red Bones, will be published on 20th February 2009, and I'm looking forward to reading it!

Click on the map below to go to WhereDunnit's map of Ann Cleeves's Shetland Quartet:

Thanks to Roger Cornwell for permission to use his photo of the Bonhoga Gallery, Shetland, and to Jean Rogers for her wonderful view of Shetland, top.

Northumberland: Ann Cleeves and the Vera Stanhope books.

The windswept coastal villages and rolling moors of Northumberland are the settings for Ann Cleeves's three novels featuring Detective Inspector Vera Stanhope, first introduced in The Crow Trap (1999).

In this book three women, all of them with secrets, come together in an isolated cottage in the Northumberland National Park to undertake an environmental survey. But after two sudden deaths it is up to Stanhope to untangle the mysteries they would rather keep hidden. Big, brisk but basically kindly and with a reputation for eccentricity, Stanhope gets results through dogged persistence coupled with a wise intelligence and the ability to see unexpected connections. She hides her decisive mind behind a lugubrious and down-to-earth exterior. The location for this story – Baikie's Cottage – is based on a settlement called Threestone Burns, right up in the hills of the national park.

The second in the series, Telling Tales (2005), sees Stanhope seconded to South Yorkshire to investigate an apparent miscarriage of justice, but she returns to her cottage in the Northumberland hills for Hidden Depths (2007). Cleeves's mastery of shifting persepective is particularly evidenced in this finely crafted tale. The investigation revolves around a series of bodies discovered drowned surrounded by flowers like pre-Raphaelite figures, and a group of four men bound by the ties of old friendship.

Seaton, where much of the novel is set, is based on Holywell, near Whitley Bay in Northumberland. Deepden, where one of the bodies is discovered, is a fictional village up the coast is somewhere on the wide sweep of Druridge Bay. Hidden Depths is an intriguing and beautifully crafted story, and Stanhope is a strong and interesting detective.

Although I am enjoying very much Cleeves's latest Shetland Quartet series, I hope we haven't seen the last of Vera Stanhope!