I did have a debate with myself about whether this should be a Series I Love or a mystery series or a bingable series post, but given that I read all fifteen books in the series in less than six weeks and kept going out to get more of them so I could find out what happened next it has to count as a series I loved surely.
Ok so first book in the series, The Crossing Places was a BotW at the end of February, but I’ll recap you the set up any way. Dr Ruth Galloway is a forensic archaeologist who teaches at the (fictional) University of North Norfolk. At the start of the series she is in her late 30s, single and living in a cottage in a pretty bleak area of the Norfolk coast that she fell in love with while working on a dig some years before. She’s fiercely independent and the isolation of her house mirrors the life that she has created for herself. In The Crossing Places she is called by the local police when the bones of a child are found on a beach. This is how she meets Detective Inspector Harry Nelson, originally from Blackpool but who moved to Norfolk to run the Serious Crimes Unit. Ruth becomes the North Norfolk force’s resident forensic archaeologist, which means their paths keep crossing every time historic remains are found and and through the cases Ruth’s life starts to change and expand in all sorts of ways, personal and professional. There are fifteen books in the series, which cover about the same period of time – starting in around 2008 and taking us right through the pandemic – which is quite the experience to revisit in a book!
This has got a lot of things that I love in crime books as well as a good mystery to solve – namely a great cast of supporting characters that form a sort of found family, lots of links and call backs to previous books in the series which reward reading in order and a romantic thread with a strong will-they/won’t-they vibe. Now I know I review a lot of romance books and so some of you reading this are going to be romance readers (as well as crime readers) so please follow this * to the bottom of the post for a spoiler-y point that may be a deal breaker for some of you.
As I’ve said, I binged my way through all of these in about six weeks to the detriment of my other reading plans – and it would have been quicker if I could have got hold of some of the books faster. And yes, it gave me a massive book hangover when they were over because I’d grown so attached to the characters and enjoyed being part of their lives. However, I’m glad that I came to them when the series was already complete because it meant I could just gobble them up and not have to wait a year to find out what happened next – and there are a couple of these that end of cliff hangers which would have driven me mad!
I’d read four of the seven books in Elly Griffiths’s Brighton Mysteries before I came to these – and as I said in the BotW for Crossing Places, I think I had been avoiding these because the covers looked like they would be too dark for me. But they’re no darker than the Brighton ones (which I started because I spotted the first one on NetGalley back in the day) and although they’re darker than most of the American cozy crimes I read, they’re not dark-dark. They’re probably somewhere around the Hawthorne and Horowitz and Thursday Murder Club point in the scale, if such a scale existed.
These are really easy to get hold of – I bought several of these from various Waterstones and Foyles around central London when I finished the one I was reading while I was staying in London. Do read them in order if you can because as I said there are lots of links between them. And of course they’re on Kindle and Kobo too – including omnibus editions of some of them if you want to save some cash on buying them individually.
Have a great weekend!
*As you’ve probably guessed Nelson is the love interest here – but he’s also married and if cheating/infidelity is a deal breaker for you in your reading you will not like this series, do not read, do not pass go, do not collect £200 etc.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 