My love for Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway mysteries continues with the sixth installment, The Outcast Dead. I loved catching up with Ruth, daughter Kate, and DCI Harry Nelson and his team of DIs, as well as Cathbad and his dog, Thing. It’s the reason I return again and again to the series: because the core characters are likeable and interesting. With every book, while Griffiths has stalled any further relationship between Harry and Ruth, the group grows ever closer, either in friendship, or intimacy. The Outcast Deads sees an addition: a new DI who, Griffiths hints in one sly little scene, may play an ever-more interesting part in Nelson’s life (or this could be a red herring, only more reading will answer my questions) and a possible new love interest for Ruth, an American no less! Events concluding The Outcast Dead, in particular, see interesting developments and changes. As for the mystery itself, while compelling and seeped in Ruth’s love of the “dig,” well, it was emotionally the most difficult of the lot. (more…)
Tag: Norwich-Set
Elly Griffiths’s Ruth Galloway Mysteries: A ROOM FULL OF BONES, #4
As I mentioned in a previous post, when I had an Audible account, I listened to Elly Griffiths’s first three Ruth Galloway mysteries. Recently, I read #4, A Room Full of Bones, and it may be my favourite yet. (I have the rest stacked and ready to go all the way to the most recent, #11, The Stone Circle. I’m hooked, yes, and a fan.) Like her standalone mystery, The Stranger Diaries, Griffiths has a winning combination of elements: a likeable, detecting, female lead, literary and genre allusions to make a reader smile fondly, a snappy style, smooth voice, moreover in the third person (my preference), and a great balance between the central mystery (the variable) and the personal lives of her detecting team (the given). That combination of original material with the steady thread of a group of compelling characters can see me follow a detecting series for years (witness my love for and obsession with C. S. Harris’s Sebastian St. Cyr Regency mysteries, all the elements of Griffiths’s within a historical setting). Griffiths’s protagonist, Ruth Galloway, is an academic, a forensic archaeologist professor at North Norfolk University, who’s drawn again and again, thanks to her “bones” expertise, into police cases headed by DCI Harry Nelson of the Norfolk police and his team members. (more…)
Miss Bates Reads Romance 