'The Locked Room' Ruth Galloway Mysteries #14 by Elly Griffiths

 

From the BLURB; 

Ruth Galloway and DCI Nelson are on the hunt for a murderer when Covid rears its ugly head. But can they find the killer despite lockdown? 

Ruth is in London clearing out her mother's belongings when she makes a surprising discovery: a photograph of her Norfolk cottage taken before Ruth lived there. Her mother always hated the cottage, so why does she have a picture of the place? The only clue is written on the back of the photo: Dawn, 1963.

 Ruth returns to Norfolk determined to solve the mystery, but then Covid rears its ugly head. Ruth and her daughter are locked down in their cottage, attempting to continue with work and home-schooling. Happily, the house next door is rented by a nice woman called Zoe, who they become friendly with while standing on their doorsteps clapping for carers. 

Nelson, meanwhile, is investigating a series of deaths of women that may or may not be suicide. When he links the deaths to an archaeological discovery, he breaks curfew to visit the cottage where he finds Ruth chatting to her neighbour whom he remembers as a carer who was once tried for murdering her employer.

'The Locked Room' is the 14th book in the 'Ruth Galloway Mystery Series' by Elly Griffiths 

Oh my gosh, I was so looking forward to this book and it did not disappoint!

First of all - and because I finished Book #13 in April 2021, after bingeing the whole series - I've got to say that I think Elly Griffiths made a BANG ON right decision, setting this in 2020 and during the UK pandemic (first) lockdown. I guess she knew she would - because the 'Ruth Galloway' series is generally very sequential with books coming within a few weeks or months of each other (every so often a book will leap ahead by a couple years, but that's generally been to get child-characters out of diapers and more active in the story, is my reading of it!). And in 'The Night Hawks' Griffiths did very cleverly end that book with Ruth's university mentioning a newfangled teaching tool called Zoom ... but I do credit Griffiths with leaning into the pandemic of it all and staying true to how these characters have been evolving in real-time (there's previously been mention of Brexit, so it is very much within the bounds of reason that we'd see how the pandemic affected higher-education, policing, crime, etc.) For me, personally, I wasn't put off or unable to read this book because of the pandemic. Honestly, it was interesting to read the slow unravel of how things happened in the UK ...

'The Locked Room' is still a frustrating book in other ways, for fans of the Ruth and DCI Harry Nelson pairing. Of course it is. That's a theme of this series in which the characters live in a literal liminal space between water and land in Norfolk - and have been making decisions that see them similarly trapped between rocks and hard places. For Ruth it's falling for a married man and having a baby with him, knowing he'll never entirely choose or be there for them. For Harry it's finding himself with two families he loves (in different ways) and knowing that any decision he makes will hurt one of them.

Well it's more of that ... even as this 14th book sees Harry's wife Michelle locked-down in Blackpool for the duration of the novel, so Ruth and Harry are coming back together in their affair - even, for the first time since holiday-set 10th book 'The Dark Angel' where they get to be together day-on-day and glimpse another world in which they live together as a whole family, with Kate.

The illusion however, is quickly shattered by Harry's daughter Laura coming home for lockdown and a perplexing run of suicides that might have more sinister underpinnings. Not to mention talk of uncovered 'plague pits' in Norfolk, and a 'Grey Lady' haunting the town square.

I found this to be a very satisfying murder-mystery, even if the personal aspects of the character and their evolution dragged feet again. ALTHOUGH - I will say - I think this book will end up being a little reprieve for big waves coming (I say this every book, and then nothing much overly changes between Ruth and Harry but I am forever hopeful).

My prediction is that Michelle will have come home with an ultimatum for Harry - either she's started seeing someone (unlikely, since Griffiths did and wrapped that with the Tim storyline) more likely I think Michelle will be insisting that Harry retire and/or they move away from Norfolk. A couple times Harry alluded to Superintendent Jo wanting him to retire, and that Judy - his second in charge - really should be a DCI, but to do that Harry would need to step aside and retire or leave. Ruth previously moved away to Cambridge with her American lover Frank, so now it feels like Harry's turn ... also that Ruth's worst nightmare should come to pass (Harry not choosing her and Kate) and maybe Harry should get a taste of what actually making a decision feels like (the kicker being; he'll miss Ruth more than he wants to keep calm-waters with Michelle). If that's all the case then I'll be really emotionally wrought and excited.

Overall; another fab instalment and I once again can't believe I've got to wait until Feb 2023 for more! GAAAAH!

The pandemic worked especially well - allusions to the struggles of international uni students, lack of PPE gear, Ruth disbelieving that she's going through a once-in-a-lifetime event with a leader called Boris, domestic violence prevalence in lockdown, murmurings of Oxford university searching for a vaccine ... it's all still so close to the surface and used to great effect here by the masterful Griffiths, to keep readers and these characters grounded in the here and now - even as we still grasp at the more liminal love story that's forever just out of reach.

4/5

'Dr. Ruth Galloway Mystery' Series by Elly Griffiths

‘Dr. Ruth Galloway’ is a mystery-series by British author Elly Griffiths. It started in 2009 and is currently 13-books deep, with a 14th scheduled for release in February 2022 and according to a recent ‘Poisoned Pen’ podcast I listened to, Griffiths thinks it’ll be a few more books and then concluded in some fashion (although she also mentioned liking Ian Rankin’s style of setting aside his ‘Inspector Rebus’ series for a number of years, and returning to a much older and much-changed Rebus for a refreshed take). 

Dr. Ruth Galloway is the protagonist and she’s a forensic archaeologist at the (made-up) University of North Norfolk, with a specialty in bone excavation and examination. In the first book – ‘The Crossing Places’ – Ruth is drawn into an investigation by Norfolk’s own Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, who thinks he’s found a body in the saltmarsh, but that turns out to be an Iron Age preserved corpse. Still, Ruth gets drawn into the larger picture which sees Nelson trying to find a missing child gone 10-years, and a more recent missing child likely connected to the first. 

This first case is already of vital importance to Nelson who has been haunted by it for these many years when he crosses paths with Dr. Ruth Galloway, whose particular way of seeing the past and digging up long-dead secrets seems to open up new leads and leeway’s in the case. 

Now, this is important because I want to drop a semi-big spoiler here when I say that by the end of that first book, Ruth is pregnant with Nelson’s child after a one-night-stand borne out in the heady aftermath of a crushing and gruelling discovery in the case. From here on in, Ruth Galloway and Harry Nelson become the main players in this series – it’s told in omniscient third-person, and though we mostly stick with Ruth’s POV we also get a fair chunk of each book told through Nelson’s eyes and those of his closest police officers – namely Dave ‘Cloughie’ Clough and Judy Johnson, so we can see various cases unfold at a closer level. There’s also a local Norfolk Druid called Cathbad who befriends both Nelson and Ruth, and others on the team, and also becomes integral to the series and entwined in the lives of these characters.

And of course, the whole series is tightly woven around the increasingly complicated relationship of Ruth and Nelson – who share a child. 

Nelson is married to his wife of 20-years, Michelle, and they have two teenage daughters – Laura and Rebecca. Though Nelson forthrightly admits in interior dialogue that he’s had two previous ‘flings’ before cheating on Michelle with Ruth, he realises fairly quickly that there’s something different about this encounter, beyond the obvious conception of a child together. Nelson is a no-nonsense Blackpool original who is from a bygone era of policing. He doesn’t have a lot of time initially for Ruth’s world of academia and ‘Guardian-reading’ outlook on the world. Furthermore – and as he (annoyingly) mentions repeatedly throughout the series; Ruth is not his type. She’s 39 when they meet (Nelson is a few years older), stubbornly single living on the edge of the saltmarsh in a stone cottage; she’s overweight and ‘untidy’ (which I secretly suspect is fatphobic code for personally ‘slovenly’?), doesn’t wear make-up and doesn’t care what people – men especially – think of her, and least of all Nelson. All of which he finds oddly, confusingly, enticing. 

Ruth and Nelson do become a focal point for the series, and this will – I warn you – both frustrate and delight. Griffiths, in trying to capture Nelson’s gruff and non-PC generational masculinity often devolves to comparing Ruth and Michelle on these binaries of “hot” and “not” – he and Michelle may have been married for 20-years, but Michelle (who is a hairdresser, and I suspect there’s huge trope and cliché playing here too) isn’t at all interested in Nelson’s policing, her domain is domesticity and beauty … but in Ruth, Nelson increasingly finds a force to be reckoned with, a woman who he finds funny and intellectually stimulating – not least when they’re working a case together. But a lot of time in the book we’re subjected to Nelson being constantly ~BaFfLeD~ at the thought of a fat, non-blonde and beautiful woman being of interest to him because she has a personality and he likes talking to her. Shock. Horror.

From book 1 when Ruth and Nelson’s baby in conceived to current book #13 – the series spans a decade, to their child growing to be 10-years-old, and in the forthcoming 14th book the timeline of the series will bring us into the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic raging around the world in 2020. Book 13 set in September 2019, even enticingly has Ruth at her University getting a lesson on “remote-learning” and the foreshadowing from a fellow lecturer warning that one day all classes could be conducted via Zoom-meetings. I actually love this aspect of the series, that the timeline is very closely packed and often-times one book’s ending will be the beginning of the next. And very occasionally we’ll get a leap-ahead by 2-years to mostly speed up relationship complications, or to age Ruth’s child. 

I do love this series for that too – for Elly Griffiths writing a most unconventional of female ‘detective’ hero in Ruth Galloway. Not just because she’s older, fat and otherwise living a spinster life (these characters abound, especially in UK-crime; just think ‘Vera’) but because she actively dismisses the thought of living with a man (even when she begins pining for Nelson and something more with him), she’s a woman repeatedly shown to have a healthy sexual appetite and who is not short of enthusiastic partners. All in all; she’s a refreshing read and savvy hero to get behind, even as her more celebratory aspects often cast an even more dubious light on her affection for Nelson (he who cannot fathom being attracted to a fat women he enjoys conversing with.) I also love that as she digs deeper into her role as single-mother, this too becomes an integral part of the sleuthing and crime-solving; juggling childcare and constantly worrying at putting herself in danger if she is the sole-provider and only parent for her child. 

I also like that Ruth presents a flip from the typical (and mostly American) convention of gruff older male heroes in crime-fiction, who inexplicably entice a bevvy of beautiful young women to their beds, despite being ‘slovenly’ and grumpy. Ruth is almost that archetype gender-flipped and it is surprisingly refreshing, even as it’s occasionally regressive too. Case in point is how she’s often pitted (in his mind at least) against Nelson’s beautiful, blonde wife Michelle – a woman who even her own daughter at one point remarks, has a tendency to brush hard topics aside and try to forget them, certainly not think about them. This is contrast to Ruth, who often remarks that it’s her job to excavate the past and constantly examine it – I much prefer to think of Ruth and Michelle in these world outlook binaries, rather than physical ones. 

I also think the series is incredibly clever for the way Elly Griffiths essentially takes one careless act – Harry and Ruth sleeping together during one night of shared misery, conceiving a child by happy accident – and then the rest of the series is essentially the repercussions and fissures of that moment constantly playing out and reverberating around Nelson and Ruth’s lives. This is crime – in a nutshell, is it not? One devastating act that has a ripple-effect on life in so many ways, and affects so many people. That is the basis of Griffith’s series, more so than Ruth’s forensic archaeology constantly being needed, is the fact that she will always be in Nelson’s life now, and he in hers. 

For this reason too, the series is frustrating. Because that fracture – in Nelson’s happy home-life, and Ruth’s seemingly determined singledom – resulting in a child they share together; that fracture existing and constantly teetering, is essentially what the series is built on. Fractures are arguably the basis of crime-fiction too; series in which we get to know and care for characters and want to see them safe and happy, that by definition would disarm the genre in which they exist and we love reading them in. I fear that Nelson and Ruth getting together in some amalgamation of a Happily Ever After might result in a Karin Slaughter ‘Grant County’-level rupture to trigger a restart. Because there are no happy-endings in crime, right? 

Well. I don’t know. Maybe Griffiths has built enough high-stakes that should Nelson and Ruth get together properly, Nelson’s world in particular would fragment and falter – he’d arguably lose a lot, to gain the love he’s seemingly craving more and more. I think it could be done, and I’ve certainly been taken in hook-line-and-sinker to this series to keep reading and hoping I’ll find it. February 2022 does indeed seem a long way away, and I miss Ruth and Nelson already after bingeing this series over one fortnight … I find myself desperate to get back to the lonely, liminal space of the saltmarshes in Norfolk, and Ruth’s cozy cottage by the sea. 

4/5

'The Crossing Places' The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries #1 by Elly Griffiths

 

From the BLURB: 

A child's bones are discovered on the windswept Norfolk marshes. Believing them to be ancient, the police call in Dr Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist. But this is no prehistoric grave. A cold missing person case has now become a murder investigation.

Dr Ruth Galloway is called in when a child's bones are discovered near the site of a prehistoric henge on the north Norfolk salt marshes. Are they the remains of a local girl who disappeared ten years earlier - or are the bones much older?

DCI Harry Nelson refuses to give up the hunt for the missing girl. Since she vanished, someone has been sending him bizarre anonymous notes about ritual sacrifice, quoting Shakespeare and the Bible. He knows that Ruth's expertise and experience could help him finally to put this case to rest.

But when a second child goes missing, Ruth finds herself in danger from a killer who knows she's getting ever closer to the truth...

***

'The Crossing Places' is the first book in UK author Elly Griffith's 'Ruth Galloway' series, which currently stands at 13 books with a 14th releasing in 2022.

I bought this first book *ages ago* from a secondhand bookstore, because I recognised the 'Ruth Galloway' series as one that fans of ‘Rev. Clare Fergusson & Russ Van Alstyne Mysteries’ by Julia Spencer-Fleming recommend as a similar-read. And the main reason I knew it was a similar-read was the establishment of a slow-burn romance between characters, just like in Spencer-Fleming's books ... which is personally something that I find I need in my crime-series in order to hold interest, and alleviate the darker aspects of the story.

So I've had 'The Crossing Places' sitting on my shelf for a while, and I only pulled it down because these last two weeks I've been in a real reading-slump and haven't been able to find anything that holds my interest. So I figured I'd go to my tried-and-trusted genre, crime-fic ... problem solved. Literally and figuratively.

Ruth Galloway of the series title is a 39-year-old forensic archaeologist and college teacher who specialises in bones. One day a DCI Harry Nelson comes to her office at the local university requesting her presence at a possible crime-scene, because they've found some bones ... very specifically they've found bones in the saltmarsh and peet has preserved them in such a way that they can't at first glance tell if they're thousands of years old, or tied to a missing-child investigation Nelson is currently involved in.

'Ruth Galloway' takes place at a fictional Norfolk area surrounded by saltmarsh (think of the Nine Lives Causeway and secluded Eel Marsh House, in the Susan Hill gothic novel 'The Woman in Black' for how this setting is pitched in Griffiths book too. Eerie and full of buried secrets.)

It turns out that the body Nelson has is indeed two-thousand years old and from the Iron Age. A truly extraordinary find for Ruth to document ... but she also becomes intrigued by the case that the imposing Harry Nelson is investigating, linked to a historic disappearance of another little girl 10-years ago.

So the setting for this book is truly brilliant - the saltmarsh and their sinking, glugging, muddy waters with the tide coming and going and buried forests in the ground is truly exciting and extraordinary, even more that Ruth has a house on the outskirts of the marsh and this desolate, beautiful landscape becomes spine-chilling fodder for the crime to unfold.

I loved the twists and turns of this first book, even as a few of the characters and their connections became slightly too-outlandish and convenient for me to fully believe. I did pick the culprit early on, but throughout the book and with the introduction of red-herrings and new suspects I did find myself second-guessing ... and that's not at all a bad way to be reading a new crime writer.

What did surprise me in this book is the Ruth and Harry connection. I was fully prepared for a slow-burn, maybe checking on fan-forums to see which of the 14-books I could expect some movement and action on the romance front ... so I was *shook* to discover that this relationship has a bit more kindling to it. And the many layers of complications it present by the end is pure genius.

But I think the main reason I am excited to launch off into this series now, is Ruth herself. No, I didn't love the many mentions of her being overweight (this is probably the part that read the most 2009 poorly aged for me; it's not even other people commenting on her looks, it's Ruth's internal dialogue about herself on occasions that I just didn't need). Harry for his part, matter-of-factly says that Ruth isn't his type and is indeed overweight, but it's the way she carries herself that has him intrigued. She doesn't need him, or anybody it seems - she's self-sufficient and confident and that absolutely is a lure for him and readers too.

I properly got into this first book and now I can't wait to dive head-first in 12 more!

4/5