'I love these isolated places ... I feel safer somehow on the edge'

MAY be seeing Ashley Jensen and Alison O'Donnell on our screens in the 10th season of BBC1's Shetland - but author Ann Cleeves has not finished with her original fictional cop, DI Jimmy Perez, played by Douglas Henshall in the first seven series.

- 

The bestselling author and inspiration behind Shetland and Vera has moved Jimmy from Shetland to Orkney, where he is living with his fellow police officer partner Willow and their child - and together they've become a crime-solving duo in her new novel The Killing Stones.

“It was going to be a standalone but all my series started off as standalones and I really enjoyed writing it - I can’t wait to go back to Orkney, too, which is a very special place,’ says the bestselling, award-winning author.

“It's much gentler than Shetland, it's more green, fertile, in a sense it’s more Scottish”

Her last Shetland novel, Wild Fire, was published in 2018, when Jimmy was moving to Orkney with Willow - so why has Cleeves decided to bring him back?

“I thought, that’s the end, I don’t need to write any more about him, but then I get a kind of longing to go north again because I do love the islands, so it’s about place, really, and about exploring how Jimmy might fit in to anew environment and how his setting up home with Willow and their son might mellow him a bit, make him easier, happier”

Cleeves, 71, who has enjoyed phenomenal success with TV adaptations of her book series featuring Vera Stanhope, Shetland and Matthew Venn, had a slow burn to publishing stardom.

“Twas 20 years without any commercial success,” she recalls.

“The books went into libraries and the occasional indie bookshop but certainly you wouldn’t have seen it on a Waterstones shelf. So it had to be fun. It didn’t feel like work. It was what I did for myself when I wanted my own time and space.”

It was only after a TV producer - who coincidentally was looking for a new female detective to fill a Sunday night slot - discovered a copy of one of her Vera Stanhope novels in a charity shop, that her career took off.