... her overwhelming need for someone to hold, someone to make her forget Nelson going back to his newborn baby, someone to make her forget that she is nearly fifty and, in the Bronze Age, would probably have already been dead for twenty-odd years. [loc. 1535]
Harry Nelson receives some letters that bring to mind the events of The Crossing Place, when he first met Ruth Galloway. The letters might almost have been written by Erik Andersen -- but Erik is dead. Isn't he?
Ruth is involved with another dig on the salt marsh -- this one a circle of stones -- and discovers not only ancient remains, but bones that are rather more recent: the skeleton of a little girl who disappeared without trace thirty years ago. Can there be justice for Margaret Lacey after so long?
Harry and Ruth are both, for different reasons, anxious about Harry's wife Michelle's pregnancy. (Michelle is anxious too, and terribly lonely, because she can't talk to anyone about the events at the end of The Dark Angel. ) And Harry is wondering whether it's time, at last, to tell his daughters Laura and Rebecca that they have a half-sister.
This felt like a return to form after The Dark Angel. It's deliberately reminiscent of The Crossing Places, but the core characters have grown and changed over the last eight years and eleven books. Griffiths handles the murder of a child sensitively but unflinchingly, describing how the victim was sexualised in the popular press. Society's moved on since then -- since '1981, the days when Jimmy Savile was considered a lovably eccentric entertainer' -- and Margaret's murderer gets short shrift for his comments about 'twelve going on thirty ...she knew what she was doing'.
This series does read more like soap-opera saga than cutting-edge crime, but I always learn something new about archaeology, and I like the characters (however exasperatingly they behave). The Stone Circle ends on a rising note, a potential fresh start for Ruth. I'll be interested to see how that turns out.
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