The disentangling all of the threads kept me interested through the entire story. Meanwhile Harry Nelson's team is also dealing with the importation of high quality drugs from over seas that apparently no one in the criminal community knows about. Lord Smith is also a racing stable owner, married with three adult children, one of whom helps with the stable, one who is a successful QC and one who is a wastrel. These bones were collected by the ancestor of the founder of the museum, Lord Smith. The museum also houses some Australian aborigine bones that a group calling itself the Elginists (Lord Elgin's marbles but I'm not sure why they named themselves after the guy who took the marbles from the Parthenon) want repatriated.
Murder or natural causes? A drug habit might argue one, but menacing letters in his desk drawer might argue the other. Ruth Galloway, forensic anthropologist, finds the body.
The window is open, a single shoe lies on the floor and a guide book whose pages riffle in the breeze. He is found lying dead beside the coffin of a medieval bishop that had been excavated from a site that had once been a church and then an industrial site. The story opens with the death of a director of a small local museum. However, the author made a decision to have a significant event in the relationship between Ruth and her baby's father happen between books that actually seems to help the story arc in my opinion. I actually said that I wasn't looking forward to forensic anthropology with a toddler. I was disappointed in the previous Ruth Galloway mystery (The House at Sea's End). It's all a matter of taste - this book with its phantasmagorical storyline just wasn't interesting to me. I liked the more traditional detective tale involving ancient remains and what happened to them. In reading other reader's comments, I understand that many love this new direction, the Druidical hocus-pokus, the spells and charms.
We still get Ruth dealing with her young daughter, but the emphasis has definitely changed. Now the focus is equally on one of the other characters, Cathbad, a Druid, and now seems to center on his occult beliefs, rituals, super powers and abilities. The series has now taken off in a different direction. The earlier books focused on Ruth Galloway, an archaeologist and single mother, which was an interesting combination, and meant a mystery focused on ancient remains, their origins and what might have occurred. The author has subtly changed genre, and this doesn't interest me anymore. I enjoyed the second book, and the third, too, but not as much. I usually wait for a second-hand copy to become available. I loved Elly Griffith's first book so much that when the second came out, I bought it right away - something I almost never do.
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