The Outcast Dead (Ruth Galloway Mystery)
Griffiths bases her title and the book’s opening scene on an actual ceremony for “the outcast dead” (paupers and prostitutes long ago flung into a mass grave), held every year at Cross Bones Graveyard in London. The ceremony, which Griffiths transports to Norwich, fits beautifully with the fictional recent find at Norwich Castle of a grave likely containing the bones of Mother Hook, a woman hanged outside the castle for murdering children entrusted to her care. Heroine Ruth Galloway, the Norwich University lecturer and forensic archaeologist seen in five previous mysteries, does a star turn for a TV series in considering the guilt or innocence of the Victorian Mother Hook. At the same time, Galloway’s sometime lover and father of her three-year-old daughter, DCI Nelson, investigates the wrenching case of a mother accused of smothering her baby. Griffiths deftly blends the themes of two women accused of child killing. Then she turns up the heat under this seething cauldron of blame and guilt by having two Norwichchildren kidnapped. A deft blend of death in the past, death in the present, and death chillingly close to occurring. --Connie Fletcher