The Frozen People

Elly Griffiths has put her Ruth Galloway series to bed and come back with a new series featuring a police detective called Ali Dawson. I’m wasn’t sorry to see Ruth walk off into the sunset as I thought she’d rather exhausted the story of those characters but I do hope Griffiths writes more of her other series of Brighton mysteries in the future - those are definitely my favourites of hers. Though in looking up whether there are any new ones I’ve just realised she has a series with Harbinder Kaur as well and I’ve only read one of those.

Anyway, back to Ali Dawson. She’s a cold case investigator with the Met but - and this is a departure for Griffiths - she works with a unit who actually travel in time to investigate historic cases. To me Griffiths is always more about the entertainment than the actual mystery or the writing, and this definitely delivers on the entertainment front. It’s a quick easy read, and I suddenly realised that there weren’t nearly enough pages left in the book to tie everything up. Yep, though the main mystery plot gets a conclusion there isn’t really a full resolution by the end of the book, it’s very much set up for you to come back for the next in the series.

It’s silly and interesting, and it’s a bit hard to get annoyed about historical improbabilities when you’re overlooking scientific implausibilities. All the same I rather liked some of the interactions between the twenty first century characters and the nineteenth century ones. Ali has a fair number of things in common with Ruth but doesn’t feel like a transposition. I’m not complaining about any of that really, and I’ll be back to read more.