There is a new mystery from Anne Cleeves, set, as always, in the Shetland Islands. In her books, like those of Elly Griffiths (see “Mapping Fiction, Elly Griffiths” on this site) the landscape is an active character. It shapes the human characters and how they live. It drives the plot by limiting the choices that characters can make. And, at times, it is the plot. Her latest book, for example, opens with a landslide that tumbles the body of a recently-killed woman, into open view.

A constant theme in the Cleeves books is the difficulty of getting around in the Shetland Islands. Action is suspended while key characters wait for a ferry to an adjoining island, or for someone to arrive by boat or air from Scotland or Norway, or for the airport to reopen or a road to be cleared after a storm.

I slogged through a couple of her books, always wondering whether a character traveling quickly from Lerwick to Yell will drive across a bridge, take a car ferry, hop a ride on a mail boat, or charter a plane. I wondered whether the ferry crossing to Fair Isle took longer than the crossing to Whalsay. I wondered why these islands, which are part of Scotland, were so much shaped by the culture and economy of Norway. I needed a map.

The map that follows is my solution.

To make sense of the islands as a setting for novels, the map needs to operate at two scales simultaneously. It needs to show the Shetland Islands themselves, to help explain the relative proximity of locations where plot events happen and the transportation links that connect those places. But it also needs to put Sheltand itself into some context, to show its status as an in-between place, only slightly closer to Great Britain than to Norway, and close to the North Sea oil fields that play a large role in the local economy.

This map is styled on traditional paper maps. But, obviously, the map you are reading here is an online product. It illustrates the design power of classic paper maps, even if those maps are ultimately presented on a computer screen rather than a sheet of paper or on the endpapers of a book. That power depends on two characteristics of a map like this:

First, it can present two scales simultaneously. This saves the user from needed to use zoom controls to zoom in for detail then zoom out for context, perhaps forgetting the details in the process, as he or she would when looking at a map from an online mapping service. Second, it lets the cartographer, not the user, chose the appropriate scale. With that power, of course, comes the responsibility for the cartographer to choose those scales well.

It’s worth noting, in closing, that the map does not need color. Places, distance, and transportation links can all be represented perfectly clearly in black, white, and maybe a little gray. Colors might look flashy, but would actually reduce the effectiveness of the map. If colors were not chosen carefully, key features would be unreadable by users with color-impaired vision. And if the color map were ever reproduced in monochrome, information communicated by those colors would be lost.