'...the body will turn out to be thousands of years old.’
‘It might not,’ says Judy. ‘Stranger things have happened.’
‘They certainly have,’ says Nelson. ‘And mostly to us.’ [loc. 231]
I'm in that strange reading mood where the familiar is best, and where if I like something I want more of the same thing: hence reading this novel straight after the previous one in the series ...
The eponymous Night Hawks are a group of metal detectorists who prefer to roam the countryside after dark. One night they discover a dead body on the beach, almost on top of a tangle of bones and metal. The skeleton is Bronze Age: the more recent corpse might be an illegal immigrant. Ruth Galloway, who's now back in Norfolk (minus Frank) and Head of Archaeology at the University of North Norfolk, attends the scene with her obnoxious new colleague David Brown, who's full of stories about how the Beaker people almost wiped out the original Neolithic population of Britain by introducing a 'new virus'. (Why, yes, this novel was published during the Covid pandemic.) Ruth does not feel that blaming migrants for disease is wise -- even when an apparently-healthy young man, one of the Night Hawks, dies suddenly of an unknown illness. When the Night Hawks are involved in more suspicious deaths (an apparent murder-suicide at an isolated house) Ruth and Nelson -- with the usual supporting cast -- begin to uncover an unsettling conspiracy and a lot of unexpected connections.
Again, a good and well-paced read: there's much more sense of place in this novel, with its familiar Norfolk saltmarsh setting, than there was in the previous Cambridge-focussed novel. Some high-stakes events here, and some very topical issues. And Michelle gets the spotlight for a change! I'm looking forward to the next in the series, due in 2022.
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