I’ve not heard of Ruth Galloway before and bought this book on a whim, but I’m glad that I did because it was another good police style mystery series. Set in Norfolk on the east coast of England, this book is a later one in a series so the characters are known to each other and there is history there of which readers of the other books will have awareness. However, I didn’t find that not having read them hindered my reading of this book at all. Indeed, Griffiths rather helpfully provides a summary of the characters at the end of the book which can be referred to ahead of the novel to fix the key players in your mind.
Ruth lives with her daughter, Kate in a rather remote coastal cottage. She is a professor and lectures in archaeology. She is a single parent and although she has living relatives, she has a few key people who are important in her life: Nelson, a police detective and her lover, who is also Kate’s father; Cathbad, a druid who lives a life of yoga and mystical paganism; Judy, partner to Cathbad and colleague of Nelson. There are other peripheral characters who feature but these three are integral to the narrative.
Griffiths has written a book which is set right at the start of the pandemic and the lockdowns that ensued. We follow her characters as they adjust to the limitations that the virus invoked and also how this impacts investigations. It is not so much about that though, the lockdowns merely being the context in which the story is set.
What this book does have is a personal mystery for Ruth to solve; it has the suspicious deaths of a number of women who at first are not believed to be connected but with some police intuition, connections become apparent between them; it has plague which is apt considering the fears that Covid-19 brought with its arrival.
The plot meanders its way hither and thither and we follow along like an obedient dog, mildly curious, not too vexed but enjoying the leisurely pace and keen to see where we are being taken.
It all leads to a satisfying conclusion with some plot lines open to carry over into the next one in the series.
Very enjoyable, especially if you like murder mysteries and police detective stories that aren’t too gruesome.
Scuffed Granny 