{"id":4481,"date":"2022-06-25T07:27:04","date_gmt":"2022-06-25T14:27:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/?p=4481"},"modified":"2022-06-25T07:27:04","modified_gmt":"2022-06-25T14:27:04","slug":"elly-griffiths-the-locked-room","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/elly-griffiths-the-locked-room\/","title":{"rendered":"Elly Griffiths: The Locked Room"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Under her spell.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

It is historically significant to have lived through a pandemic \u2013 and we seem to be emerging from it at last \u2013 but as you live through something historically significant, you have no actual perspective.\u00a0 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\u2019s body on a construction site.\u00a0 She takes the class along as a learning experience, event letting the students bag up the bones for transportation at the end.\u00a0 The students are curious to discover if the body comes from a plague pit, a foreshadowing of what\u2019s to come.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, Harry Nelson and his team are looking into the mysterious suicide of an apparently happy woman inside of a locked room in her own home. It makes perfect sense but it also makes no sense at all, and on Harry’s team, Judy especially cannot let this one go. When several other similar deaths seem to form a pattern, Nelson and his team are on it.<\/p>\n

Ruth is welcoming a new neighbor, and Harry is home alone as his wife and young son are off visiting his mother-in-law.\u00a0 Ruth is also sorting through her mother\u2019s things as her father\u2019s new wife wants to do some redecorating, and she discovers an old photo of the house she now lives in \u2013 a photo taken before she was born.\u00a0 These are many threads to weave together, but Griffiths manages to do so effortlessly.<\/p>\n

And the real guest of honor in this book is covid, as the events start off in February of 2020. As covid begins to take hold and lockdowns begin to roll out \u2013 the awkwardness of wearing masks, the loneliness of staying apart, the weirdness of zoom, the lack of cars on the road and the need to socially distance when you are in the same room \u2013 all of these things come rushing back as Griffiths brings them again to vivid life.\u00a0 I found it somewhat painful to read about.<\/p>\n

However, Griffiths does not write books as sociology experiments, and this one is no different.\u00a0 There is a covid death early on, and then one of the central series characters comes down with a very bad case of it, requiring hospitalization and a ventilator.\u00a0 In this way Griffiths draws the reader even further in emotionally.<\/p>\n

I was recently at a conference where I interviewed author Ellen Hart, who talked about the \u201chook and pull\u201d of narrative.\u00a0 One chapter gives you a hook, the next one pulls you through it.\u00a0 Hart is an expert at this technique, and so too is Elly Griffiths.\u00a0 She supplies a hook, she whisks you to another story thread to pull you through, and then in the next chapter comes up with another hook.\u00a0 It\u2019s very hard to stop reading a book like this.\u00a0 Technique and a bit of narrative magic are both at work.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I\u2019ve cried so much at the end of any book (maybe Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/em>) as I did at the end of this one.\u00a0 While this was an intense and dark retelling of recent events, it\u2019s an ultimately redemptive and hopeful one.\u00a0 This is another spectacular read from the talented Griffiths.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.\u00a0 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 … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[857,80,856,112,855,808],"class_list":["post-4481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews","tag-covid","tag-elly-griffiths","tag-mariner-books","tag-ruth-galloway","tag-the-locked-room","tag-traditional-detective-series"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4481"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4486,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4481\/revisions\/4486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auntagathas.com\/aa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}