A Dying Fall (Ruth Galloway Mystery)
*Starred Review* Griffiths, who won the Mary Higgins Clark Award for The Crossing Places (2010), her first novel starring forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway, returns with the fifth in the series. Griffiths again ably fuses a contemporary murder mystery with a mystery from the long-buried past. The contemporary case revolves around the death in a fire of Dan Golding, the golden boy from Ruth’s university days, whose life ended in a tiny flat in a broken-down neighborhood near an obscure northern England university housed in an abandoned cigarette factory. The day after Ruth learns of Golding’s death, she receives a letter from him, written days before he died, begging her to come to the university and help him identify bones from a find of potentially great importance. Both Ruth and Detective Chief Inspector Nelson, her former lover and father of her daughter (it’s complicated), travel north to Lancashire—Nelson to investigate Golding’s death, which has moved from accident to murder, and Griffiths to answer her old friend’s plea. Both plot strands make compelling reading, but the way Griffiths interweaves them is absolutely masterful. As with all Ruth Galloway mysteries, the application of forensic archaeology is intriguing. Ruth examines the site of a former Roman settlement and then the bones buried beneath a sarcophagus, bones that may have belonged to King Arthur himself. Readers are in for a really good time with this flesh-and-blood bone expert. --Connie Fletcher--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.