A Room Full of Bones: The Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries 4

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Halloween night, and the dead are closer than ever for Dr Ruth Galloway. She is used to long-dead bodies, but a fresh corpse in the middle of a museum is a new challenge.

I didn't enjoy this episode in the Ruth Galloway series as much as the earlier ones. Perhaps because there were many disparate threads running through it to fully engage me but maybe because there wasn't an archaeological mystery at the heart of it. While this is all going on, another little girl disappears out of nowhere. This makes matters even more complicated because now Ruth desires to throw everything away and go after this new missing girl. She will stop at nothing to find this innocent girl before another girl comes up missing. I will admit I’m reading these books for the soap opera like relationship of the main characters above all else. And although I will stress that the focus is much more on the mystery in this book than the other three, Griffiths still blessed us with some romantic moments.

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A fast-paced, insightful and murky story of ordinary lives, buried secrets, and desperate crimes' Good Book Guide. * Good Book Guide * Forensic archeologist and academic Ruth Galloway is a captivating amateur sleuth-an inspired creation. I identified with her insecurities and struggles, and cheered her on. " -- Louise Penny, author of the bestselling Armand Gamache series For example you can't be in a hospital with a person that just got well and out of ICU and talk about sexual tension or make a baby say "dada" to every male she meets.

There is no way you get to PhD level without hearing about NAGPRA and the issue of repatriation of human remains belonging to Native American and Australian Aborigine tribes. It's a sensitive issue and a very interesting one, and I heard about it for the first time during the last year of my BA. Again lots of copying and pasting from wikipedia, lots of generalization, and nothing else. Griffiths' excellent series is well-informed and original, and its setting in one of the bleaker corners of East Anglia is vividly evoked' Literary Review. * Literary Review * Meanwhile, there's a heated stoush brewing over the retention by the Smith family of several Australian Aboriginal skulls, other remains and artifacts, that are currently poorly cared for in the museum's basement. Ruth finds herself embroiled both professionally and personally in the fight to have the remains surrendered for repatriation to Australia. In her capacity as a forensic archaeologist, with a particular specialty in bones, she's asked to assess the boxed remains in situ at the museum - the titular “room full of bones”. Meanwhile, charismatic Australian indigenous poet and academic Bob Woonunga has become her new neighbour on the Saltmarsh. Woonunga is associated with Ruth's friend Cathbad and several others in an organisation called the Elginists, who are concerned with the location and return of indigenous artefacts held within the vaults of British museums. As DI Harry Nelson and his team descend to investigate the death of museum curator Neil Topham, Ruth finds herself in the unenviable position of being the person who found the body (this is starting to become a habit!). The investigation leads Sergeants Judy Johnson and Dave Clough to the nearby racing stables owned by Lord Danforth Smith, whose aristocratic ancestor is celebrated by the museum in which the body was found.

A Room Full of Bones

There are two ways out of Lord Smith's study. One says 'New World Collection' and one 'Local History'. She pauses, feeling like Alice in Wonderland. A slight sound, a kind of whispering or fluttering, makes her turn towards Local History. She feels in the mood for a soothing collection of Norfolk artefacts. She hopes there are no more waxworks or embalmed animals. I thought the parts about Michelle's reaction to Harry's affair where realistic and sad, it's obvious they both care a lot for each other but perhaps they married too young and have little in common. I'm glad that Harry is going to see Kate now, not seeing her felt very sad. It's great Ruth has someone in her life but I fear for people getting hurt here too.

The dialogues and thoughts of the characters are repetitive, the characters are boring and selfish, the relationships between them shallow and the situations most of the time ridiculous! WINNER OF THE 2016 CWA DAGGER IN THE LIBRARY. Halloween night, and the dead are closer than ever for Dr Ruth Galloway. She is used to long-dead bodies, but a fresh corpse in the middle of a museum is a new challenge. The fourth beguiling Dr Ruth Galloway mystery. I'm always pleased to hear that another Elly Griffiths novel is on its way and no less this time. The mystery was a little different in this outing, with Ruth, the forensic archaeologist, more removed from the central action than in prior books. But she is very involved with the central characters and these novels are as much about the characters as the mystery. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Waitomo District Library for the loan of A Room Full of Bonesby Elly Griffiths for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions.

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Ruth Galloway teams up again with Harry Nelson and they do some deep and extensive research. They find out that the house where the construction project took place was once an orphanage. Going forward, Ruth and Harry get in touch with the priest that was in charge of the orphanage. The priest does in fact remember the disappearance of two children. But one of the biggest draws is the whole theme of spirituality that is a pronounced undercurrent in each volume. Ruth's parents, the born again Christians, have provided Ruth something to rebel against and she has become a materialist. Show the proof or go away. Harry is Catholic and desperately wanted Kate christened, so much so that he made arrangements for the ceremony. In everyday life however, he's a hard headed pragmatist with no patience for mystical goings on. But both Ruth and Harry have Cathbad the Druid in their lives. Cathbad, who often seems to show up at just the right time to prevent disaster, who has an undying love of ceremonies around bonfires, and an annoying tendency to know just the detail that his friends are searching for. Also the author seems to have a fetish with cheating since 99% of her characters are cheating on their partners and worst of all I as a reader can't feel the connections because the author does a poorly job writing about them! One of the characters that is married gets pregnant and just ends things with her lover and it doesn't cross her mind that it might be his or she is so unethical that wants to bestow the child to her husband even though it might not be his! I love encountering new words and this book presented me with "murmuration," which is defined as "the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky." Beautiful! Not copying the two diminutive bits of forensic archaeology information straight from wikipedia would help, too. I suppose it may not make a difference to most readers, but having started a biological anthropology course just 3 months before reading this book I had enough knowledge to get infuriated at how superficial Griffith's presentation of forensic archaeology is. I'm not expecting her to get a degree in forensic sciences or anything, but at least get your facts straight and don't simplify things for the sake of a plot twist.

Nelson is a tough working-class northern guy, and blah blah blah. We get that too, we heard it all before (about three times in three other books, in fact) with exactly the same words you used in this book. If you can't find an original way to give information on your characters to potential new readers, maybe you should try something else, like, I don't know, writing something that ISN'T a series of books with the same characters? DCI Harry Nelson is called in to investigate, thrusting him into Ruth’s path once more. When threatening letters come to light, events take an even more sinister turn. But as Ruth’s friends become involved, where will her loyalties lie? As her convictions are tested, Ruth and Nelson must discover how Aboriginal skulls, drug smuggling, and the mystery of the “Dreaming” hold the answers to these deaths, as well as the keys to their own survival. I love that she faces dilemmas and is human and fallible when making her choices. She gets tired, and grumpy, and irritable. She occasionally says things she later regrets. She 'believes' she is being a good mother by eating the chocolates from her daughter's advent calendar, thereby saving Kate's teeth. Sounds like something I would do!

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You do NOT establish the sex of a skeleton based on a single characteristic, and you definitely don't do it with one look. You're not good at suspense anyway, you might as well have written that Ruth spent hours squinting at the skeleton like serious professionals do and then came up with the answer. I became utterly absorbed as the story unfolded ... Another wonderful entry in this justifiable highly acclaimed series' Promoting Crime Fiction. * Promoting Crime Fiction * The Ruth Galloway Series is a great read for anyone interested in the crime and mystery genre. These books are filled with great action, great dialogue and, most of all, great characters. Another great thing about these books is that they do not go too far deep that young adults cannot read them. Mature teenagers will enjoy these books over a long summer vacation and even adults enjoy these books, too.