The Stone Circle by Elly Griffiths

The lonely stretches of marshland on England’s coast in county Norfolk are home to forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway, who first appeared in The Crossing Places in 2010.  This is the eleventh entry in the mystery series by Elly Griffiths, and it circles back to the first book through similar themes, characters, and plot lines. 

Ruth, who is a lecturer at a local university, is sometimes called in by the local police force to evaluate the bones found in local digs or criminal investigations.  She is a meticulous researcher, a loner, and somewhat bristly, but she is drawn to Detective Chief Inspector (DCI) Harry Nelson—both professionally and personally—creating a complicated relationship and a difficult problem for this married father of two adult children and most recently, a newborn.

The Stone Circle opens with DCI Nelson and Ruth receiving threatening letters in the vein of ones sent to them a decade before—but the problem is that the original sender is long-since dead.  Those, along with the discovery of two skeletons at a newly found stone ring, bring the two together to look into an archeological mystery and a missing-child case from twenty years before. 

This is an excellent police procedural that is strengthened by its atmospheric setting and archeological details, as well as by the the strong characterizations of Ruth and Nelson (who now have an 8-year-old daughter); their charged relationship adds tension to the suspenseful story. The secondary characters shine in their own right.  Nelson’s staff is fully fleshed out and includes the maternal DS Judy Johnson and the hilarious millennial DS Dave Clough. In addition, there is the local druid Cathbad, the visiting Norwegian archeologist Leif Anderssen, Nelson’s family, and the extended family whose daughter mysteriously disappeared; they all add much to the story. 

One of the things that makes the book so interesting is that local lore, Bronze Age information, nods to the political scene of 2016, references to classic literature and to Harry Potter are woven throughout the pages.  Because the book is full of people who are continuing characters or who are past characters related to this current plot, I would recommend reading this series in order to appreciate it fully. 

Highly enjoyable reading for people who like the books written by such authors as Erin Hart, Julia Spencer-Fleming, or Deborah Crombie,

Published on May 7.  Advanced copy from NetGalley.

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

Works Projects Administration - http://newdeal.feri.org/library/i15.htm

Images of the WPA librarians who carried books into rural areas during the Depression have been cropping up on Facebook recently, and they have piqued my interest in this early mobile library service, so I was intrigued to see this new novel coming out on May 7 by Kim Michele Richardson, herself a resident and scholar of Kentucky.

A couple pages in, and I feared that The Book Woman was heading into cornpone Beverly Hillbillies territory, but how wrong I was.  This story of Cussy Mary Carter, a “book woman” for the WPA in the hills of Kentucky during the Great Depression, tells about the heroic efforts of the real library women (and a few men) who traveled on horses or mules at great peril to deliver books, old newspapers, magazines, homemade scrapbooks of recipes and local folk remedies to people in the eastern hills of “Kaintuck” who were literally starving—for food, but also for reading material, letters, news, and stories that delivered hope, information, and entertainment.
Author Kim Michele Richardson deftly puts people’s speech patterns into the local dialect and intimately describes the hardscrabble life of people who were eking out livings by coal mining and subsistence farming in the dark and barren hollers.  But even more, she richly describes the customs and folklore of the region, the treacherous pathways to get to mountain schools and remote cabins, and the rare (and actual) blood disorder that affects Cussy Mary and her family and turns their skin blue, making them “colored” and subject to prejudice, isolation, and persecution.

How do people—and particularly, Cussy Mary and her family—survive and thrive in a time of hard living and isolation, prejudice, illiteracy, enslavement by coal companies and the resulting environmental issues and black lung disease?  These are all interwoven into an immersive story that is suspenseful, heartbreaking, and hopeful.  This corner of America in the 1930s is brought to life in a brilliant way, with so much to think about and to discuss.

Put this at the top of your list as it’s historical fiction at its finest.  The author's webpage provides information on her books: https://www.kimmichelerichardson.com/
Check out the giveaway on Goodreads!