THE HOUSE AT SEA'S END
By: Elly Griffith
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: New York
2011 (HC)
The third Ruth Galloway archaeology mystery is an
atmospheric tale set on the bleak English Norfolk coast. The settings for
the two previous novels (the saltmarshes in The Crossing Places and
the darkly sinister Woolmarket Street Victorian mansion in The Janus
Stone) were as key to the plot development as the human characters, and
the eponymous House at Sea’s End is no different.
A team of archaeologists from the University of North
Norfolk discover human bones while conducting a survey at Broughton Sea’s
End. Erosion of the beachfront and the sandstone cliffs overhead has
exposed the long-buried bodies. Ruth Galloway, the University’s forensic
archaeologist, recently returned from maternity leave after the birth of her
daughter Kate, identifies six adult male bodies in the eroding gap along the
shore below the brooding House at Sea’s End. She establishes that they are
not ancient burials, but rather recent – perhaps seventy years or so – and
their hands have been bound and they have shot execution-style. This brings
in the Norfolk police and emotional challenges for Ruth, primarily in the
person of DCI Harry Nelson, who is the married (but not to Ruth) father of
baby Kate. In the early course of their investigation, Ruth and DCI Nelson
interview the master of Sea’s End House, the redoubtable MEP (Member of the
European Parliament) Jack Hastings. He knows nothing of the bodies found
below his 1930s-era baronial estate, but he does intimately know the history
of the house and surrounding community; seven decades earlier marked the
early days of World War II and the feared invasion of Britain by the Nazis.
Jack’s father, Keaton “Buster” Hastings was apparently something of a
village martinet, and in his capacity as captain of the Home Guard, he and
his stalwart band of those local men too old or too young to serve in the
uniformed services viewed themselves as the nation’s bulwark against Nazi
invasion.
When the two remaining members of the Home Guard—both
octogenarians by now—die within weeks of each other under somewhat
questionable circumstances; when isotopic analysis suggest the victims’
remains were those of men who had lived in Germany; and when a young German
historian researching a rumored “invasion” of the Norfolk by Nazis in 1940
is found in the surf below Sea’s End House, stabbed to death, Harry Nelson
and Ruth begin to question whether men are being murdered today to keep the
secret of a heinous war crime committed seventy years earlier. Their search
for the truth leads Ruth into grave personal danger and may possibly even
threaten the life of the infant Kate.
Elly Griffiths has written another masterful novel of
mystery and violent passions whose roots are firmly planted in the past.
She masterfully works in a knowledgeable and credible description of the
excavation of the burials that are threatened by the imminent destruction of
the site by the on-rushing tide; she treats with great sensitivity and
realism the challenges Ruth faces as a single mother and the reluctant
participant in a doomed love affair; and she provides a compelling
back-story of agonizing loss and an insatiable thirst for revenge from
Ruth’s early years as a forensic archaeologist in the killing fields of
Bosnia in the 1990s.
Four trowels for this masterful work and I wait with
great anticipation for the forthcoming A Room Full of Bones!
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