Elly Griffiths: The Locked Room
I have devoured every word of the Ruth Galloway series, and each time I pick one up, I am reminded again what wonderful, pure reads these books are. From the second you crack open the first page to the moment you close the cover at the end, Griffiths as a storyteller holds her reader completely in her grasp. Under her spell. Bewitched. This book is no different, though it was, to me, a bit more intense and a bit more grim as she confronts covid front and center.
It is historically significant to have lived through a pandemic – and we seem to be emerging from it at last – but as you live through something historically significant, you have no actual perspective. A start to gaining some perspective is to read a thoughtful examination of just what happened, which Griffiths provides her reader. As the book opens, Ruth is teaching an archeology class and she gets a call that there’s body on a construction site. She takes the class along as a learning experience, event letting the students bag up the bones for transportation at the end. The students are curious to discover if the body comes from a plague pit, a foreshadowing of what’s to come.