A ROOM FULL OF BONES
By: Elly Griffiths
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company: New York
2012 (HC)
With A Room Full of Bones, author Elly Griffiths
continues the same high quality of writing and storytelling that readers
have come to expect since her highly acclaimed initial Ruth Galloway
mystery, The Crossing Places. Ruth is a middle-aged forensic
archaeologist at the not-particularly prestigious University of North
Norfolk near the North Sea coast. Her life has been recently enriched and
complicated by the birth of a daughter, whom she is raising as a single
mother. While rearing a one-year-old is a challenge for anyone, or any two
people, author Griffiths is to be commended for not allowing her heroine to
descend into self pity or self indulgence; the presence of one-year-old Kate
and the complicated relationship Ruth must maintain with the child’s father,
the very married Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson, neither detracts
from nor get in the way of the story line, but rather adds to the character
and depth of the main protagonists.
The novel opens with the delivery of a coffin, recently
unearthed by salvage archaeologists within the foundations of a medieval
church, the future site of a supermarket to be built in King’s Lynn, to the
Smith Museum. The coffin is believed to hold the body of the sainted 14th
Century Bishop Augustine Smith, an ancestor of the family that sponsors the
museum and many other local philanthropic enterprises. Ruth has been called
upon to provide expertise as the coffin is to be opened in the presence of
the public and the news media. Arriving a bit early at the museum, Ruth is
horrified to find the body of the young curator Neil Topham beneath the
trestle table upon which the coffin rests—the victim of foul play or natural
causes?
DCI Harry Nelson is drawn away, at least momentarily,
from a long-running drug smuggling investigation, to investigate the
curator’s death—a death that is looking much less natural when he discovers
drugs and a sinister letter in Topham’s desk drawer. The letter reads, “You
have ignored our requests. Now you will suffer the consequences. You have
violated our dead. Now the dead will be revenged upon you. We will come
for you. We will come for you in the dreaming.”
The investigation leads to Lord Danforth Smith, the
present heir to the Smith patrimony as well as acclaimed racehorse trainer
and reluctant local celebrity. Lord Smith seems to be honestly stunned by
the news of the young curator’s death and discloses that he and his family
have been threatened by the Elginists, a shadowy group dedicated to the
repatriation of artifacts and human remains to their homelands. The Smith
Museum, it seems has housed human remains of Australian indigenous peoples,
collected by the wily and unscrupulous great-grandfather of the present-day
Lord Smith.
Ruth is again drawn into this web of mystery and mayhem
when Lord Smith asks her to turn her trained eye on this macabre
collection—literally a room full of bones. Although her professional and
ethical standards require her to demand of Lord Smith that the remains be
immediately repatriated—a recommendation he does not easily accept—Ruth is
again on hand when Bishop Augustine’s coffin is finally opened and an even
greater shock is in store for the Smith dynasty—and then within a day of
that event Lord Smith dies in the throes of violent and feverish dreams,
just as Bishop Augustine Smith was said to have experienced when struggling
against the powers of Satan!
Dark powers seem to be arrayed against the household of
the Smith clan as DCI Nelson and his unit of investigators, along with Ruth,
struggle to find rational answers to these bewildering occurrences. Answers
are ultimately provided after a frenzy of action takes place literally on a
dark and stormy night and evil, both ancient and contemporary, is brought to
light.
Three trowels for this fourth and very atmospheric Ruth
Galloway mystery.
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