Raven Black

Raven Black begins on New Year's Eve with a lonely outcast named Magnus Tait, who stays home waiting for visitors who never come. But the next morning the body of a murdered teenage girl is discovered nearby, and suspicion falls on Magnus. Inspector Jimmy Perez enters an investigative maze that leads deeper into the past of the Shetland Islands than anyone wants to go.

Raven Black is a 2006 novel by Ann Cleeves that won the Duncan Lawrie Dagger Award for the best crime novel of the year. Raven Black is the first in the "Shetland" mysteries, a series of eight novels by Cleeves, composed of two quartets, all set in Shetland.