The Janus Stone

A touch of food poisoning for the last three days. I won’t give you the awful details. It gave me a chance to sit in my recliner all day and alternate sleeping and reading. The book was a recent discovery of a writer I did not know, Elly Griffiths. She writes a series of mysteries set in Norfolk in England. This is an area of broads (rivers) and coast and saltmarsh on the east coast. It was an area that we visited on one of our many trips to England. I was happy to find a mystery set there. Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist sometime called in by the police to help in investigations. DCI Harry Nelson is the policeman in this case, The Janus Stone. There is a dig near her home which is being supervised by a colleague from Sussex University. But the crime involves a child’s body being found under a doorway in a building which is being remodeled into condos in Norwich. Turns out to be a five-year-old girl. At one time the place was an orphanage and a girl did disappear, along with her older brother, during that time. Was this the missing girl? Or is the skeleton much older, Roman or even Iron Age? There are several suspects; the dig’s supervisor, the priest who ran the orphanage, some one in the developer’s family. And among several interesting turns, Ruth Galloway finds herself pregnant, a single university professor, overweight and nearing forty. Altogether a pretty good mystery, interesting characters, and to me at least, a setting with which I was fairly familiar, Norwich, the Norfolk broads and the coast.