At first I thought I was hallucinating--no WAY her clownish male characterizations would have been permitted. He wrote that he believed he had found “The Raven King” in an archeological dig, and wanted her to come give a second opinion on the bones. The story is classic Ruth Galloway and it cannot be faulted, the usual suspects are all there, with the twist that the main plot is set on the Lancashire coast. in " The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly " Publishing This Week" newsletter.

As a result therefore some of the aspects that I least like about the series were rather grating for me this time – in particular (from an earlier review): the way in which the books rely far too heavily for plots on intimidation and then actual physical threats to Ruth; her involvement in cases that she is investigating is not just repetitive but ridiculously coincidental (in both books too many of the story lines overlap in an insular fashion) and implausible (how often are forensic investigators really dragged into cases); having the main tension in the book around threats to someone who is the protagonist of a known series removes the concept of jeopardy almost entirely (even if it is I think more of a crime/procedural genre than a series flaw).

Not even the new additions that are involved in this story that seemed to me without depth and uninteresting.

Our main character is a 42 year old forensic anthropologist who, lives with her almost 2 year old daughter and a cat out on the marshes in splendid isolation. For another, the job she turns out to have been hired for—leading an investigation her new boss doesn’t feel he can entrust to his own force—makes her queasy. She is very attractive, and everybody is surprised to discover that Clayton could have such a good-looking wife. I have often wondered what exactly it was that those Elizabethan musicians chose to play as Orsino makes this speech.

As it turns out, that house fire wasn’t an accident and Ruth, and soon Harry, are caught up in the machinations that led to Dan’s death and that he was himself embroiled in. She's constantly wrong-footing herself with him and, while she does it for all the right reasons, it inevitably backfires on her. A memorable, breathless race against time…One of the most cinematic finales in recent British crime novels.

The school term at North Norwich University if ending for Ruth Galloway, who teaches archaeology, when she receives news of an old university school chum's death in a tragic house fire in Lancashire. It is the stuff of which readers dream and the well-deserved winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award. One of the most cinematic finales in recent crime fiction' Daily Telegraph Dr Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist, spends a lot of time looking at death. Now Shona is in a relationship with Phil, Ruth’s boss, and they live together after he left his wife. Twenty years since their student heydays, Dan is seeking Ruth's expertise in identifying what he believes to have been a 'significant discovery', and the note of fear she reads between the lines is all too clear.Their experience of this place, with its atmosphere of death impending through the walls, is known only and entirely through its sounds.

I really enjoyed book 5 of this Ruth Galloway series, parts of it even more than the previous books.And yet, aside from the horror of the violence, the lasting impression of a viewing of this show is how very unreal our relationship with sound is, and particularly the sound of dying.