This is where, twenty-four years earlier, a timber circle had emerged from the sea, a great archaeological discovery, certainly, but also an event that, in Cathbad’s opinion, created a disturbance in the ether, a cosmic jolt that is still causing repercussions in the lives of the people involved. ‘Things are still slightly out of balance,’ he said recently. ‘Ruth and Nelson. That only happened because of the energies from the dig.’ [p. 250]
The fifteenth (and, as it turns out, the last 'for now') Ruth Galloway novel: Ruth is an archaeologist and head of the archaeology department at the fictional University of North Norfolk. Her on-off love interest, Harry Nelson, is a Detective Chief Inspector. Their daughter Kate is now at secondary school. Ruth's friends include Cathbad the druid, Ruth's recently-discovered half-sister Zoe, and various police officers and academics, past and present. The setting is more or less contemporary (Cathbad is suffering from Long Covid, the first time I've seen it used as a plot device) and mostly East Anglia, with a focus on the neolithic flint mines known as Grimes Graves. And the murder mystery here begins (after a prelude describing an unsettling 'living archaeology' experience, some years before the action of the novel) with the discovery of a woman's skeleton behind a boarded-up alcove in a cafe.
This felt, in places, very much an end-of-season special: characters from previous novels reappeared, situations were resolved, improbably happy endings were achieved. That made it a very pleasant read, though there was also considerable tension, of several kinds, building until the last chapter. Ruth exhibited more backbone ('See you in a week. Bye now.') than in previous books, and Kate played a key role. The skeleton's origins were discovered, the bad behaviour of a senior academic revealed, and Tony Robinson and Mary Beard were namedropped. And all's well that ends well -- but now I want to reread the whole series, start to end! There are some early volumes that I barely recall...
Fulfils the ‘Written in Present Tense’ rubric of the 52 books in 2023 challenge.
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