The Frozen People by Elly Griffiths - #bookreview

Alison Dawson can never cross the Old Kent Road without thinking of Monopoly. The brown quare nobody wants. She used to play it with one of her husbands, she can't remember which, offhand...

The Blurb

Ali Dawson is a police officer working on crimes so old, the joke goes, that they are not only cold but frozen. What most people don't know is that the team travels back in time to complete their research - a process pioneered by the mysterious Italian physicist, Serafina Pelligrini.

So far the team has only ventured a few years back but Ali's boss has a new assignment for her. He wants her to step back to 1850, the heart of the Victorian Age, to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric great-grandfather of Tory MP Isaac Templeton.

To prepare for the challenge ahead, Ali researches the Victorian era. She learns that Cain Templeton was part of a sinister group called The Collectors, the rumour being that you had to kill a woman to become a member. Duly prepared, she arrives in London in January 1850, at the peak of the so-called mini ice age, to start her journey in a house used by artists, with a dead woman at her feet.

Soon she finds herself in extreme danger. Even worse - she appears to be stuck, unable to make her way back to the present, to her life and to her son, Finn.

A brand new series from No 1 bestselling author of the Dr Ruth Galloway Mysteries. If you're missing Ruth and Nelson, wait till you meet Ali and Cain.

My Review

I adored every one of the Dr Ruth Galloway series of books by this author (links to previous reviews at the end of the post.) When I heard the author, Elly Griffiths had written the first in a new series, I was very keen to read it but with a little trepidation. After all, when you read a series that you love, there is always the possibility that something new might disappoint.

However, my fears came to nought as I enjoyed this book very much. It is very different to the Dr Ruth Galloway series. In fact, I would suggest not going into this thinking it might be similar. This is very different and actually, I enjoyed seeing this talented author turn her hand to something a little different.

The main character, Ali Dawson is a police officer working on a cold case review team. It is a little different to the usual 'cold case' scenario as the officers can actually travel back in time in order to solve the crimes. Thus we see Ali travel back to London in 1850 in order to investigate Cain Templeton, a man associated with a group known as The Collectors. It is said that in order to become a member, one has to murder a woman. What made this even more interesting is that we detect the beginnings of an attraction between Ali and Cain. I can hardly wait for the next book to see whether this relationship develops. 

Whilst she is stuck in the past, Ali's son Fin, is arrested for the murder of Cain's descendent. Needless to say, she is keen to get back to the present to clear his name.

It is a refreshing new take on this genre of books - crime and science fiction mixed together, and it worked very well. The edges of the genres blur perfectly. I loved the way both past and present parallel one another and how a resolution is found.  Although the book moves between past and present, it did so seamlessly.

Ali is a fabulous character. She is a determined, strong minded woman and I am looking forward to seeing how her character develops in subsequent books in the series. 

I highly recommend getting started with this series. I know that I am going to read them all.

Book Details

ISBN:  978 1529433371

Publisher:  Quercus

Formats:  e-book, audio, hardback and paperback

No. of Pages:  368 (paperback)

Series:  Book 1 in the Ali Dawes series

Purchase Links

Bookshop.org

About the Author

Bestselling crime author Elly Griffiths worked in publishing before becoming a full-time writer.

Her series of Dr Ruth Galloway novels, featuring a forensic archaeologist, are set in Norfolk and regularly hit the Sunday Times top ten in hardback and paperback. The series has won the CWA Dagger in the Library and has been shortlisted three times for the Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Novel of the Year. There are twelve books in the series so far with number thirteen to be published in February 2021.

Her Brighton-based mystery series set in the 1950s and 1960s is inspired partly by her grandfather's life on the stage and the war magician Jasper Maskelyne, who claimed to have spent the war creating large scale illusions to misdirect the enemy. One of the two leading characters in the series, Max Mephisto, is based on Maskelyne. 

In 2017 she was Programming Chair of Theakston's Old Peculiar Crime Festival in Harrogate, the oldest and best-established crime fiction festival in the UK.

In 2018 Elly wrote her first standalone novel The Stranger Diaries. The novel was a top 10 paperback bestseller, selected for the BBC Radio 2 Book Club and as a summer 2019 Richard and Judy book.

In 2019 Elly published her first children's book in spring 2019 to great reviews with a second following in 2020.

Elly Griffiths lives near Brighton with her husband, an archaeologist, and their two grown children.

You can also find Elly at:

Author Website

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The Hagley Wood Murder by M. J. Trow - #BookReview

"I felt that I was in hell itself. All around me were great squat wych elm trees ... like round-bellied devils with beards and shaggy hair. Was it such a night as this that death visited the woods, turning, for the first time in criminal history, a tree trunk into a coffin? What happened that night? Was the wood in fact the scene of ghoulish rites ... was the body brought ... from some other place of execution and carried through that very undergrowth now clinging and clawing at my ankles, to it's secret resting place?"

The myths kick in almost at once.

***

Astonishingly, The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book solely on the subject (other than a selection of privately printed/self published offerings) ever written on this murder, which took place eighty years ago.

In April 1943, four teenaged boys discovered a corpse stuffed into the bole of a wych elm in a wood in the industrial Midlands. The body was merely bones and had been in the tree for up to two years. The pathologist determined that she was female, probably in her thirties, had given birth and was just under five feet tall. The cause of death was probably suffocation.

Six months after the discovery, mysterious messages began to appear on walls in the area, variants of ‘Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm – Hagley Wood’. And the name Bella has stuck ever since.

Local newspapers, then the national press, took up the story and ran with it, but not until 1968 was there a book on the case – Donald McCormick’s Murder by Witchcraft – and that, like others that followed, tied Bella in with another supposedly occult murder, that of Charles Walton on Meon Hill in 1945.

Any unsolved murder brings out the oddballs – the police files, only recently released, are full of them – and the nonsense still continues. The online versions are woeful – inaccuracy piled on supposition, laced with fiction. It did not help that a professional occultist, Dr Margaret Murray, expressed her belief, as early as 1953, that witchcraft was involved in Bella’s murder. And ill-informed nonsense has been cobbled together to ‘prove’ that Dr Murray was right.

McCormick’s own involvement was in espionage and his book, slavishly copied by later privately printed efforts, have followed this tack too. It was wartime, so the anonymous woman in the wych elm had to be a spy, parachuted in by the Abwehr, the Nazi secret service.

The Hagley Wood Murder is the first book to unravel the fiction of McCormick and others. It names Bella and her probable murderer. And if the conclusion is less over-the-top than the fabrications referred to above, it is still an intriguing tale of the world’s oldest profession and the world’s oldest crime! 

***

I first came across this case on a podcast. It was a sensationalised view of 'Who Put Bella Down the Wych Elm' but made for an interesting listen.

In this book, the author sets out to look in detail at the various stories, myths and speculative theories which have revolved around the case, since the discovery of her body by four boys in 1943. Everything from witchcraft to espionage as well as many other suggestions have been purported as theories of Bella's demise. Bella's identity was never discovered, let alone how or why she ended up dead inside of a tree.

This is the first book which pulls together all of these theories and examines them individually. It has been extensively researched and well written. It was easy to read and did not get too bogged down in any particular theory. Instead, the author presents us with a comprehensive guide to the case and the various opinions that have surfaced in the last eighty or so years.

The case was officially closed in 2005 as it was decided that there was no possibility of it being solved.

Whilst, the author has debunked the majority of the theories around this case, he does venture to impart his own, plausible theory of who Bella was and who murdered her.

ISBN:  978 1399066457

Publisher:  Pen & Sword

Formats: e-book and hardback

No. of Pages:  224 (hardback)

About the Author:

M J Trow (the 'M' as most people know by now stands for Meirion, a Welsh name few can manage, so he writes as M J, is known by all and sundry as Mei, rhyming with 'my') has been writing for many years, with his first book - The Adventures of Inspector Lestrade - being published in 1984 by Macmillan. More Lestrades followed and then some true crime and somehow it all snowballed so now he has many historical biographies and three other crime series (Maxwell, Marlowe and Grand and Batchelor, the latter two written with his wife, writing as Maryanne Coleman, though her name is Carol, actually!) to his credit. He claims to be retired, but that's just from teaching. In fact he has never been busier and is a sought after 'ghost' these days as well as historian and novelist, with many different subjects' stories having been told through him. He has recently started collaborating on fiction projects (with someone other than his wife, that is) and finds it a really exciting and pleasurable experience.

To relax he ... actually, that's a bit tricky, as he doesn't really ever relax. He has been known to garden, he is a keen cook and artist and likes to travel. This is rather easier these days as he is a popular speaker on cruise ships - in fact his profile picture was taken on a very gusty day in Cape Town, setting off on a long voyage home to Southampton through some of the scariest seas he and his wife have had the pleasure to meet! It really was the calm before the storm, despite being a Force 9 just leaving the Bay.

Family is important and he is very proud of his wife, Carol (aka Maryanne Coleman) for her own books and also the ones they write together, the Kit Marlowe series. His son, Taliesin, known as Tali, is a writer who has written a biography of the Tudor explorer Martin Frobisher as well as collaborating with Mei on several biographies. An exciting series is in the melting pot at the moment and will hopefully be appearing soon; remember where you heard it first. Tali is also a musician, playing various instruments with some acclaimed bands; Gemma Hayes, the Coal Porters, Circulus and currently acid-folk ensemble The Lords of Thyme. He also records and tour-manages. His crystal vocals enhance everything he does and it's just as well someone in the family can sing, as it is the first thing anyone asks a Welshman!

(ARC courtesy of NetGalley)

(Author photo and bio info courtesy of Amazon)

Death on a Monday Night by Jo Allen - #BookReview #BlogTour

 

Becca Reid had slunk out of Wasby Village Hall into the gathering dusk like, she thought, a timid wild animal creeping about in the undergrowth. It was rare that she felt the need to be so furtive. On the contrary, she was in the forefront of every gathering, because there was always something to be done and she was one of those people who always seemed to end up doing it. On this Monday night, her sense of community notwithstanding, she'd been desperately keen to skip the monthly meeting of the Wasby Women's Institute and stay at home with a cup of cocoa watching Arsenal on the telly, but civic duty had won out. It would have been cowardly to stay away, and she was no coward.

***

An ex-convict. A dead body. A Women’s Institute meeting like no other…

It’s an unusually challenging meeting at the Wasby Women’s Institute, with local resident and former drug-dealer Adam Fleetwood talking about his crimes and subsequent rehabilitation…but events take a gruesome turn when prospective member Grace Thoresby is discovered murdered in the kitchen.

The case is particularly unwelcome for investigating officer DCI Jude Satterthwaite. Adam was once his close friend and now holds a bitter grudge, blaming Jude for landing him in jail in the first place. To complicate things further, the only thing keeping Adam from arrest is the testimony of Jude’s former girlfriend, Becca Reid, for whom he still cares deeply.

As Jude and his colleague and current partner, Ashleigh O’Halloran, try to pick apart the complicated tapestry of Grace’s life, they uncover a web of fantasy, bitterness and deceit. Adam is deeply implicated, but is he guilty or is someone determined to frame him for Grace’s murder? And as they close in on the truth, Jude falls foul of Adam’s desire for revenge, with near-fatal consequences…

A traditional detective mystery set in Cumbria. 

***

As a member of the Women's Institute myself I was really looking forward to reading this book. I am extremely glad that I did as I enjoyed it very much indeed. The murder takes place during a meeting of a village WI, and the author did a great job of creating the atmosphere and sometimes confined feeling of a small village.

This is the eighth book in the series featuring DCI Satterthwaite but it worked very effectively as a stand alone novel. It is unusual for me to begin a series so far along but I very much wanted to read this book, and therefore, broke my self-imposed rule of only reading a series in order. Having said that I enjoyed this to the point that I intend going back to the beginning of the series to read Death by Dark Waters.

The descriptions of rural Cumbria were exquisite. I was not at all surprised to find that the author lives in the Lake District. I went to the Lakes on a school trip in my teens (ahem, that was some time ago) and I have longed to go back ever since. Reading this book has reignited my desire.

The characters were very well portrayed and believable. Jude is a great main character and his relationship with those around him well depicted.

I recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good murder mystery.

SBN: 979 8440889293

Publisher: Independently Published

Formats: e-book and paperback

No. of Pages: 296 (paperback)

About the Author:

Jo Allen was born in Wolverhampton and is a graduate of Edinburgh, Strathclyde and the Open University, with undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in geography and Earth science. She's been writing for pleasure and publication for as long as she can remember. After a career in economic consultancy she took up writing and was first published under the name Jennifer Young, in genres of short stories, romance and romantic suspense. She wrote online articles on travel and on her favourite academic subject, Earth science. In 2017 she took the plunge and began writing the genre she most likes to read -- crime. Jo lives in the English Lakes, where the DCI Satterthwaite series is set. In common with all her favourite characters, she loves football (she's a season ticket holder with her beloved Wolverhampton Wanderers) and cats.

Murder in Chianti by Camilla Trinchieri - #BookReview

                                                                                                                                                                     

"Monday, 5.13 a.m. The sun wouldn't show up for at least another hour, but Nico got out of bed, shrugged on a T-shirt, pulled on a pair of shorts and socks, and laced up his trainers. Bed had stopped being a welcome place, both back in the Bronx brownstone he and Rita had lived in for twenty-five years, and here in this century-old, two roomed farmhouse he'd rented since May."

Mourning the loss of his late wife, Rita, former detective Nico Doyle moves to her hometown of Gravigna in the wine region of Chianti. He isn't sure if it's peace he's seeking, but that certainly isn't what he finds: early one morning he hears a gunshot near his cabin and walks outside to the sight of a flashily dressed man with his face blown off.

Salvatore Perillo, the local inspector, enlists Nico's help with the murder case. It turns out more than one person in this idyllic corner of Italy knew the victim, and with a very small pool of suspects, including his own in-laws, Nico must dig up Gravigna's every last painful secret to get to the truth.

***

So many of us have had to stay-cation this year. Not a bad thing in itself as we have some beautiful places to visit here in the UK. However, reading this book transported me to Tuscany. It is so rich in atmosphere that I could almost taste the food, sample the wines and feel the Italian sun seeping into my bones.

Additionally, there is a stray dog who attaches himself to Nico, who has this huge void in his life following the death of his wife. I think I may have fallen a little in love with Nico. The author's portrayal of him as a kind, compassionate, grieving man is extremely well executed. As he becomes involved with the local police force in solving the murder of the man whose body he discovered we see his resourcefulness and sensitivity.

The secondary characters are equally well drawn and Ms Trinchieri is able to portray the members of a close community with real skill. Evocative language and great storytelling skills made this an extremely enjoyable read for me.

It is perfect for fans of Donna Leon, Philip Gwynne Jones and Andrea Camilleri.

I am thrilled that this is set to be the first in a series and I am looking forward to the next one already. It is a wonderful combination of character, atmosphere and murder mystery and far exceeds many books of this genre that I have read. I hope that you will enjoy it too.

ISBN: 978 0749026462

Publisher: Allison & Busby

About the Author

Camilla Trinchieri worked for many years on films in Rome with directors including Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. She emigrated to the US in 1980 and received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia University. Under the pseudonym Camilla Crespi, she has published seven crime novels, including The Breakfast Club Murder.