The crossing places

Elly Griffiths

eBook - 2010

The first entry in the acclaimed Ruth Galloway series follows the "captivating"* archaeologist as she investigates a child's bones found on a nearby beach, thought to be the remains of a little girl who went missing ten years before. Forensic archeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway is in her late thirties. She lives happily alone with her two cats in a bleak, remote area near Norfolk, land that was sacred to its Iron Age inhabitants-not quite earth, not quite sea. But her routine days of digging up bones and other ancient objects are harshly upended when a child's bones are found on a desolate beach. Detective Chief Inspector Nelson calls Galloway for help, believing they are the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went mi...ssing a decade ago and whose abductor continues to taunt him with bizarre letters containing references to ritual sacrifice, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Then a second girl goes missing and Nelson receives a new letter-exactly like the ones about Lucy. Is it the same killer? Or a copycat murderer, linked in some way to the site near Ruth's remote home? *Louise Penny

Saved in:
Subjects
Genres
Mystery fiction
Published
[United States] : HarperCollins 2010.
Language
English
Corporate Author
hoopla digital
Main Author
Elly Griffiths (-)
Corporate Author
hoopla digital (-)
Online Access
Instantly available on hoopla.
Cover image
Physical Description
1 online resource
Format
Mode of access: World Wide Web.
ISBN
9780547443171
Access
AVAILABLE FOR USE ONLY BY IOWA CITY AND RESIDENTS OF THE CONTRACTING GOVERNMENTS OF JOHNSON COUNTY, UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, HILLS, AND LONE TREE (IA).
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

With the possible exception of James Patterson, genre authors aren't robots, so you have to marvel at the strategies they use to keep their series heroes on their toes. James W. Hall's loner sleuth, who goes by the prickly name of Thorn, has long flourished in the backwaters of the Florida Keys, tying bonefish flies and composing poetry in his modest shack on a secluded lagoon. Now here he is in SILENCER (Minotaur, $24.99), held captive on Coquina Ranch, a private hunting preserve in the pinelands north of the Everglades where "beer-drinking good ol' boys with their cheeks full of chaw" go to bag themselves a Watusi bull, a blackbuck antelope or some other helpless exotic beast. Initially, Thorn is so far out of his comfort zone that he spends much of the book down in a pit. But with plenty of time for reflection, he begins to grasp the nature of the evil threatening this rugged territory, first colonized by ranchers and farmers and now pock-marked with "run-down Dairy Queens, R.V. parks, abandoned sugar mills and roadhouse bars with no signs out front." Despite his ordeal, Thorn takes the opportunity to admire the harsh beauty of the surviving wilderness and spend quality time with the men and beasts that thrive there. To be sure, the pair of murderous brothers who execute the plot's most barbarous acts of violence belong to a savage subspecies of villain that roams freely across genre boundaries. But other figures seem firmly planted in this wild landscape: Earl Hammond, the patriarch who is murdered when he tries to restore the original traditions of Coquina Ranch by turning over 200,000 acres to the state; his two grandsons, each with an opposing view on the proper disposition of the family heritage; and, most memorably, Claire Hammond, a Connecticut girl who took to the terrain and transformed herself into a true frontierswoman after marrying into the clan. As vividly as they wear their regional colors, these characters have one thing in common with their counterparts on the coast: a love of the land so fierce it breeds both righteous eco-warriors and plundering thieves, often in the same family. Whenever Robert Crais feels the need to refresh himself, he can always activate Joe Pike, a saturnine former soldier who performs id-like functions for Elvis Cole, the Hollywood private eye who is Crais's regular series hero. Pike calls the shots in THE FIRST RULE (Putnam, $26.95), a pumped-up thriller that takes its title from the guiding principle of Russian mobsters: namely, that personal relationships mean nothing in their business. Or, as one federal agent remarks: "Mom, Dad, the brother, Sis - those people do not matter." But personal relationships mean everything to Pike, a no-nonsense action figure who brilliantly wages his own clandestine war on the hit men who killed one of his former operatives and the man's entire family, including the nanny, during a home invasion. Working with select members of the elite brotherhood of mercenaries he once led and using maneuvers he learned in the Marines, Pike proves more efficient than the feds and more ruthless than the mobsters. His code of honor may be simplistic - you stand up for your guys, no matter what - but it allows tough men to have tender feelings without becoming unmanned. Why stop at adapting genre conventions when you can reinvent the whole genre? That seems to be Charlie Huston's modus operandi in SLEEPLESS (Ballantine, $25), a traditional police procedural neatly tucked into a stunningly original work of speculative fiction. Parker Haas is a young, idealistic, thoroughly likable cop working undercover in the narcotics division of the Los Angeles Police Department. His assignment is to track down any illicit traffic in a rare drug - the antidote to a disease from which his own wife and infant daughter suffer - before the dope dealers and manipulative pharmaceutical corporations corner the market. This job would be difficult enough in any big city panicked about, let's say, the local supply of swine flu vaccine. But it's positively perilous in the nightmarish environment Huston conjures up. In his apocalyptic vision, 10 percent of the world's population is unable to fall asleep - and is dying on its feet. In Los Angeles, which is under martial law but continuing to turn out movies ("People still liked a good picture"), the walking zombies have become addicted to computer games, losing themselves in an alternate universe in which "total insomnia becomes a virtue." The perverse humor of all this aberrant behavior is lost on Huston's hero, who clings to his belief in the basic goodness and dignity of humanity, even when his own eyelids start to burn. Sometimes, the best way for a writer to prepare new ground is to turn around and see what the old ground looks like. Elly Griffiths draws us all the way back to prehistoric times in her first crime novel, THE CROSSING PLACES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25), a highly atmospheric mystery set in the desolate salt marshes of England's Norfolk coast. Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist who lives there in contented solitude, agrees to date the bones of a child found buried in the mud. She identifies both the bones and the ornaments found in the grave as 2,000-year-old Iron Age artifacts, relics of a "time of ritual slaughter and fabulous treasure hoards." While this doesn't help the police detective investigating a more recent homicide, it does make a detective of the antisocial Ruth - who, like many an academic, badly needs a little adventure and romance in her life. Hall's characters share a love of the land that breeds eco-warriors and thieves - often in the same family.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 14, 2010]

Waking is like rising from the dead. The slow climb out of sleep, shapes appearing out of blackness, the alarm clock ringing like the last trump. Ruth flings out an arm and sends the alarm crashing to the floor, where it carries on ringing reproachfully. Groaning, she levers herself upright and pulls up the blind. Still dark. It's just not right, she tells herself, wincing as her feet touch the cold floorboards. Neolithic man would have gone to sleep when the sun set and woken when it rose. What makes us think this is the right way round? Falling asleep on the sofa during Newsnight, then dragging herself upstairs to lie sleepless over a Rebus book, listen to the World Service on the radio, count Iron Age burial sites to make herself sleep and now this; waking in the darkness feeling like death. It just wasn't right somehow.  In the shower, the water unglues her eyes and sends her hair streaming down her back. This is baptism, if you like. Ruth's parents are Born Again Christians and are fans of Full Immersion For Adults (capitals obligatory). Ruth can quite see the attraction, apart from the slight problem of not believing in God. Still, her parents are Praying For Her (capitals again), which should be a comfort but somehow isn't.  Ruth rubs herself vigorously with a towel and stares unseeingly into the steamy mirror. She knows what she will see and the knowledge is no more comforting than her parents' prayers. Shoulder-length brown hair, blue eyes, pale skin - and however she stands on the scales, which are at present banished to the broom cupboard - she weighs twelve and a half stone. She sighs (I am not defined by my weight, fat is a state of mind) and squeezes toothpaste onto her brush. She has a very beautiful smile, but she isn't smiling now and so this too is low on the list of comforts.  Clean, damp-footed, she pads back into the bedroom. She has lectures today so will have to dress slightly more formally than usual. Black trousers, black shapeless top. She hardly looks as she selects the clothes. She likes colour and fabric; in fact she has quite a weakness for sequins, bugle beads and diamanté. You wouldn't know this from her wardrobe though. A dour row of dark trousers and loose, dark jackets. The drawers in her pine dressing table are full of black jumpers, long cardigans and opaque tights. She used to wear jeans until she hit size sixteen and now favours cords, black, of course. Jeans are too young for her anyhow. She will be forty next year.  Dressed, she negotiates the stairs. The tiny cottage has very steep stairs, more like a ladder than anything else. 'I'll never be able to manage those' her mother had said on her one and only visit. Who's asking you to, Ruth had replied silently. Her parents had stayed at the local B and B as Ruth has only one bedroom; going upstairs was strictly unnecessary (there is a downstairs loo but it is by the kitchen, which her mother considers unsanitary). The stairs lead directly into the sitting room: sanded wooden floor, comfortable faded sofa, large flat-screen TV, books covering every available surface. Archaeology books mostly but also murder mysteries, cookery books, travel guides, doctor-nurse romances. Ruth is nothing if not eclectic in her tastes. She has a particular fondness for children's books about ballet or horse-riding, neither of which she has ever tried.  The kitchen barely has room for a fridge and a cooker but Ruth, despite the books, rarely cooks. Now she switches on the kettle and puts bread into the toaster, clicking on Radio 4 with a practised hand. Then she collects her lecture notes and sits at the table by the front window. Her favourite place. Beyond her front garden with its windblown grass and broken blue fence there is nothingness. Just miles and miles of marshland, spotted with stunted gorse bushes and criss-crossed with small, treacherous streams. Sometimes, at this time of year, you see great flocks of wild geese wheeling across the sky, their feathers turning pink in the rays of the rising sun. But today, on this grey winter morning, there is not a living creature as far as the eye can see. Everything is pale and washed out, grey-green merging to grey-white as the marsh meets the sky. Far off is the sea, a line of darker grey, seagulls riding in on the waves. It is utterly desolate and Ruth has absolutely no idea why she loves it so much.  She eats her toast and drinks her tea (she prefers coffee but is saving herself for a proper espresso at the university). As she does so, she leafs through her lecture notes, originally typewritten but now scribbled over with a palimpsest of additional notes in different coloured pens. 'Gender and Prehistoric Technology', 'Excavating Artefacts', 'Life and Death in the Mesolithic', 'The Role of Animal Bone in Excavations'. Although it is only early November, the Christmas term will soon be over and this will be her last week of lectures. Briefly, she conjures up the faces of her students: earnest, hard-working, slightly dull. She only teaches postgraduates these days and rather misses the casual, hungover good humour of the undergraduates. Her students are so keen, waylaying her after lectures to talk about Lindow Man and Boxgrove Man and whether women really would have played a significant role in prehistoric society. Look around you, she wants to shout, we don't always play a significant role in this society. Why do you think a gang of grunting hunter-gatherers would have been any more enlightened than we?  Thought for the Day seeps into her unconscious, reminding her that it is time to leave. 'In some ways, God is like an iPod ...' She puts her plate and cup in the sink and leaves down food for her cats, Sparky and Flint. As she does so, she answers the ever-present sardonic interviewer in her head. 'OK, I'm a single, overweight woman on my own and I have cats. What's the big deal? And, OK, sometimes I do speak to them but I don't imagine that they answer back and I don't pretend that I'm any more to them than a convenient food dispenser.' Right on cue, Flint, a large ginger Tom, squeezes himself through the cat flap and fixes her with an unblinking, golden stare.  'Does God feature on our Recently Played list or do we sometimes have to press Shuffle?'  Ruth strokes Flint and goes back into the sitting room to put her papers into her rucksack. She winds a red scarf (her only concession to colour: even fat people can buy scarves) round her neck and puts on her anorak. Then she turns out the lights and leaves the cottage.  Ruth's cottage is one in a line of three on the edge of the Saltmarsh. One is occupied by the warden of the bird sanctuary, the other by weekenders who come down in summer, have lots of toxic barbecues and park their 4 °- 4 in front of Ruth's view. The road is frequently flooded in spring and autumn and often impassable by midwinter. 'Why don't you live somewhere more convenient?' her colleagues ask. 'There are some lovely properties in King's Lynn, or even Blakeney if you want to be near to nature.' Ruth can't explain, even to herself, how a girl born and brought up in South London can feel such a pull to these inhospitable marshlands, these desolate mudflats, this lonely, unrelenting view. It was research that first brought her to the Saltmarsh but she doesn't know herself what it is that makes her stay, in the face of so much opposition. 'I'm used to it,' is all she says. 'Anyway the cats would hate to move.' And they laugh. Good old Ruth, devoted to her cats, child-substitutes of course, shame she never got married, she's really very pretty when she smiles.  Today, though, the road is clear, with only the everpresent wind blowing a thin line of salt onto her windscreen. She squirts water without noticing it, bumps slowly over the cattle grid and negotiates the twisting road that leads to the village. In summer the trees meet overhead, making this a mysterious green tunnel. But today the trees are mere skeletons, their bare arms stretching up to the sky. Ruth, driving slightly faster than is prudent, passes the four houses and boarded-up pub that constitute the village and takes the turning for King's Lynn. Her first lecture is at ten. She has plenty of time.  Ruth teaches at the University of North Norfolk (UNN is the unprepossessing acronym), a new university just outside King's Lynn. She teaches archaeology, which is a new discipline there, specialising in forensic archaeology, which is newer still. Phil, her head of department, frequently jokes that there is nothing new about archaeology and Ruth always smiles dutifully. It is only a matter of time, she thinks, before Phil gets himself a bumper sticker. 'Archaeologists dig it.' 'You're never too old for an archaeologist.' Her special interest is bones. Why didn't the skeleton go to the ball? Because he had no body to dance with. She has heard them all but she still laughs every time. Last year her students bought her a life-size cut-out of Bones from Star Trek. He stands at the top of her stairs, terrifying the cats.  On the radio someone is discussing life after death. Why do we feel the need to create a heaven? Is this a sign that there is one or just wishful thinking on a massive scale? Ruth's parents talk about heaven as if it is very familiar, a kind of cosmic shopping centre where they will know their way around and have free passes for the park-and-ride, and where Ruth will languish forever in the underground car park. Until she is Born Again, of course. Ruth prefers the Catholic heaven, remembered from student trips to Italy and Spain. Vast cloudy skies, incense and smoke, darkness and mystery. Ruth likes the Vast: paintings by John Martin, the Vatican, the Norfolk sky. Just as well, she thinks wryly as she negotiates the turn into the university grounds. The university consists of long, low buildings, linked by glass walkways. On grey mornings like this it looks inviting, the buttery light shining out across the myriad car parks, a row of dwarf lamps lighting the way to the Archaeology and Natural Sciences Building. Closer to, it looks less impressive. Though the building is only ten years old, cracks are appearing in the concrete façade, there is graffiti on the walls and a good third of the dwarf lamps don't work. Ruth hardly notices this, however, as she parks in her usual space and hauls out her heavy rucksack - heavy because it is half-full of bones.  Climbing the dank-smelling staircase to her office, she thinks about her first lecture: First Principles in Excavation. Although they are postgraduates, many of her students will have little or no first-hand experience of digs. Many are from overseas (the university needs the fees) and the frozen East Anglian earth will be quite a culture shock for them. This is why they won't do their first official dig until April.  As she scrabbles for her key card in the corridor, she is aware of two people approaching her. One is Phil, the Head of Department, the other she doesn't recognise. He is tall and dark, with greying hair cut very short and there is something hard about him, something contained and slightly dangerous that makes her think that he can't be a student and certainly not a lecturer. She stands aside to let them pass but, to her surprise, Phil stops in front of her and speaks in a serious voice which nevertheless contains an ill-concealed edge of excitement.  'Ruth. There's someone who wants to meet you.'  A student after all, then. Ruth starts to paste a welcoming smile on her face but it is frozen by Phil's next words.  'This is Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson. He wants to talk to you about a murder.' Excerpted from The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.