Tuesday, January 24, 2023

9. The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths

#11 Ruth Galloway
listened on Libby
2019
373 pgs.
Adult Mystery - Forensic Anthropology - series
Finished 1/24/2023
Goodreads rating: 4.19
My rating: 3.5
Setting: Contemporary King's Lynn, Norfolk, England

My commentsThis is the closest to a “so-so“ of any in this series so far-this is the 11th. It refers back quite a bit to the first in the series, which I only partially remember. Maybe some of the themes, motivations, similar characters are starting to be repetitious? I‘m getting a little bit tired of the Ruth/Nelson…situation Ms. Griffiths has Ruth applying for a job at Cambridge, a little change of scene might be just what the series needs.

Goodreads synopsis:  DCI Nelson has been receiving threatening letters telling him to 'go to the stone circle and rescue the innocent who is buried there'. He is shaken, not only because children are very much on his mind, with Michelle's baby due to be born, but because although the letters are anonymous, they are somehow familiar. They read like the letters that first drew him into the case of The Crossing Places, and to Ruth. But the author of those letters is dead. Or are they?

Meanwhile Ruth is working on a dig in the Saltmarsh - another henge, known by the archaeologists as the stone circle - trying not to think about the baby. Then bones are found on the site, and identified as those of Margaret Lacey, a twelve-year-old girl who disappeared thirty years ago.

As the Margaret Lacey case progresses, more and more aspects of it begin to hark back to that first case of The Crossing Places, and to Scarlett Henderson, the girl Nelson couldn't save. The past is reaching out for Ruth and Nelson, and its grip is deadly.

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