The Last Remains by Elly Griffiths

A fan of the Ruth Galloway series, I grabbed The last remains, really wanting to know where the relationship between Ruth and DCI Nelson would go – as well as wanting to read a well-constructed and engaging mystery. I was happy with both the relationship slant and the mystery and can recommend the book to fans of the series.

In The last remains, Ruth is faced with another skeleton, that of a young woman, Emily Pickering, who has been bricked into the wall of what was a café. She had been a young archaeology student missing since 2002, a time when Ruth’s friend Cathbad was part of her student group. As Nelson and his team investigate, suspicion falls on Emily’s Cambridge lecturer and the other students, who had all been on a weekend camp when she disappeared. Then Cathbad disappears and it doesn’t look good for him. Will the truth come out as Ruth is drawn into a dangerous game in some Neolithic flint mines in her pursuit of the murderer?

In the meantime Ruth is faced with the prospect that her department may be closed and she could lose her job, while Nelson is coming to grips with his marriage as his wife and young son come back to live with him. The relationship threads are engrossing, but so is the well written mystery, with the puzzle about who committed the murder plotted so well that it is very difficult to spot the culprit.

It is best to start the series at the beginning with Crossing places, to get to know the main characters, but then the books have a stand-alone mystery in each. I hope that this is not the last in the Ruth Galloway series but fans of Elly Griffith’s mysteries could turn to the novels with Harbinder Kaur as the detective, The Stranger diaries, winner of the Edgar Award for Best Novel, 2020, The Postscript murders and Bleeding heart yard. 

Themes: Mystery, Crime, Archaeology.

Pat Pledger