2011 mystery, fourth in the series (police plus amateur detection).
A private museum is about to open the recently-discovered coffin of a
mediæval bishop, but just before the event the museum's director
drops dead next to it.
That doesn't seem like a particularly criminal death, but he had
a surprising amount of cocaine in his desk (which ties across to DI
Nelson's major ongoing drugs case), and had been getting ominous
letters from a group demanding the return of ancestral bones and
threatening him with supernatural retribution. Then the museum's
owner, Lord Smith, dies apparently of fright…
There's some awkwardness here. Ruth, as an expect in forensic
archaeology, should already be familiar with the situation and
current ethical thinking regarding human remains removed from their
burial sites and questions about their return, not to mention some of
the things that were done to said remains in the name of racial
science; but because she has to serve as the reader's proxy for a
thing the reader may not know about, she has to be shown as
unreasonably ignorant of the whole business, then shocked when she
finds out. This might have sat better if it had been Nelson or one of
the other police characters meeting it as a new idea; they would at
least plausibly not be familiar with it already.
Similarly, Ruth confidently sexes a skeleton based on a single glance
at one bone characteristic, which is not a thing a professional would
do. (Yeah, I know what I was taught as a medical student in 1990. If
you know you are looking only at modern humans from a particular
sub-population, you can be a bit faster and more confident…)
There's an actual crime story too, with something dodgy going on at
Lord Smith's stables, and various people there who may be mixed up in
it. And there's progress in people's personal lives, with Nelson
having been forbidden by his wife from seeing Ruth (whose child he
fathered), and various attempts to patch up that messy situation.
The crime and detection elements are all right, but mostly I was
intrigued by the people, most of whom are plausible mixes of good and
bad motivations; the series regulars are showing development, which is
splendid, and I'm glad to be reading these in order rather than
piecemeal. Not for the mystery purist or subject matter expert, but
I'm continuing to enjoy them.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.