Book Review: The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths (Ruth Galloway #1)

The Crossing Places is the first in the Ruth Galloway series written by author Elly Griffiths. The story is about Ruth, a forensic anthropologist who lives a nice quiet life in Norfolk.

When some bones belonging to a child are discovered on a nearby beach, Ruth is asked to come in and help date them. The bones turn out to be around 2000 years old.

The detective on the case, DCI Harry Nelson is rather disappointed with the skeleton’s age as he was hoping to identify the remains of a girl gone missing about 10 years ago.

However soon another girl goes missing, so the investigator is left with trying to link the one case to another.

The plot is fun and I actually enjoyed reading the book. Granted it’s not my usual style of “sitting at the edge of your seat” novel and I noticed a few things that I couldn’t care much about in the book, but overall it was a great read, especially if you like archaeological style mysteries.

Some of my small gripes with the book were the fact that it was written in third person present tense, and the writing could have been a notch classier. I felt that the author didn’t really care much about how she placed her words on the paper. In terms of a work of literature, it was quite mediocre.

Despite these shortcomings, I found myself getting engrossed in the book and I knew that I would pick up the second one in the series soon.