A police investigation during the Covid-19 pandemic--a quest to solve a series of stymying suicides--unearths the past and puts a noted forensic archaeologist and her 11-year-old daughter in grave danger.
Dr. Ruth
Galloway is a (fictional) forensic archaeologist--a smart, captivating British
heroine created by author Elly
Griffiths--who always finds herself embroiled
in murder and mystery.
Over the course of 13 novels, this bright, British amateur sleuth and college professor has dealt with discoveries such as child remains (The Crossing Places), unidentified corpses from WWII (The House at Sea’s End) and secret underground tunnels (The Chalk Pit) ... among other life and death dilemmas. She’s traveled to Italy (The Dark Angel) and despite being an avowed atheist, she’s even dealt with aspects of religion (The Woman in Blue). Readers have grown along with Ruth Galloway, seeing her through life changes and challenges that have included romance, motherhood, grief and loss. It’s most fitting, then, that Griffiths has set her latest Ruth Galloway mystery, The Locked Room, (the 14th in the series) during the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic.
Just as Covid-19 is about to turn the entire world upside-down, Ruth
and her 11-year-old daughter, Kate, are suddenly forced into lockdown at Ruth’s
old childhood home, a cottage in Norfolk, where Ruth had been trying to tie up unresolved
fragments from her late mother’s life. Forced into isolation, mother and
daughter are befriended (at a safe distance) by a seemingly kind, nurse neighbor,
Zoe, a frontline worker. In the midst of them all sheltering in place, Ruth’s
on-again, off-again love interest, DCI Harry Nelson (and his team) enlists Ruth’s
help in trying to solve clues from a decades-long investigation of stymying suicides by local
women. Amidst the investigation--and limitations imposed by the lockdown--clues
from the past, including prior ties to an old pandemic and spooky folklore, weave
their way into dark danger that ultimately puts Ruth, Kate--and
Zoe, a woman who might not be all she appears to be--deep into hot water.
A cast of recurrent, familiar characters and their dramatic
personal dilemmas--along with chillingly authentic details of pandemics, past and
present--add to the suspense of Griffiths' well-conceived, brilliantly
executed cozy that delivers a shocking plot twist.
The Locked Room: A Ruth Galloway Mystery Series (Book 14) by Elly Griffiths
Mariner Books, $18.99
paperback, 9780358671398, 384 pages
Publication Date: June 28,
2022
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