Alastair McKay Pull on your jumper and enjoy: some bleak entertainment is sweeping in from the north
jumper, obviously. It is the colour of moss. But the thing with Perez is his quiet decency. He gets on with things, even when lost in the smirr of his own exasperation.
The sidekick is DS Alison “Tosh” McIntosh (Alison O’Donnell), who doesn’t appear in the Cleeves books. She plays a cheeky Robin to Perez’s exhausted Batman. Tosh is also the gateway to a receding tide of comedy in Shetland. It used to be more pronounced, but persists in the manners of the other cops, who are faintly Fargo in their bearing. DC Sandy Wilson (Steven Robertson) gets most of the wiggly lines, which he delivers in a sing-song accent. “No fingerprints,” Sandy says of the severed arm. “They’ve been burnt aff.”
This microcosmic Shetland has its u s e s a s a me t a p h o r for an island mentality, which makes it topical. The body parts belong to a man, possibly a Nigerian, who turns up looking like an alien in a silver suit and muddy shoes. You can see how he would stand out in Shetland, and it’s not giving away too much to say that the background to the story appears to be people-trafficking. Who’s involved?
Well, all the locals look like hillbillies with secrets, whether it’s the fisherman whose boat is called Silver Darling (a nod to the Neil Gunn novel) or the scrap-metal chawbacons with the Confederate flag on their pickup.
Could it go deeper? Yes, probably. The scene where Perez fires up the jukebox and it plays a lonely chanson suggests a mystery with ambitions beyond the limits of the pained procedural.