The Outcast Dead

January 20, 2014
In Mary Higgins Clark Award–winner Griffiths’s competent sixth mystery featuring archeologist Ruth Galloway (after 2013’s A Dying Fall), Mark Gates, a TV researcher for a British documentary series called Women Who Kill, takes an interest in Ruth after she uncovers the bones of the notorious Mother Hook, a Victorian-era child minder accused of killing at least 20 children in Norwich. Despite the damning folktales, Ruth suspects that Mother Hook was innocent—a belief that clashes with Mark’s vision of a monstrous child murderer. As Ruth seeks clues lost long ago, her former lover, Det. Chief Insp. Harry Nelson, is closing in on a 37-year-old woman who may have killed her three infants. Meanwhile, the self-described “Childminder” begins kidnapping young children from their homes. Griffiths astutely plays on modern anxieties about working parents and childcare. A clever ending compensates for the frequent narrative-slowing switches between Harry’s and Ruth’s cases.

February 1, 2014
Griffiths bases her title and the book's opening scene on an actual ceremony for the outcast dead (paupers and prostitutes long ago flung into a mass grave), held every year at Cross Bones Graveyard in London. The ceremony, which Griffiths transports to Norwich, fits beautifully with the fictional recent find at Norwich Castle of a grave likely containing the bones of Mother Hook, a woman hanged outside the castle for murdering children entrusted to her care. Heroine Ruth Galloway, the Norwich University lecturer and forensic archaeologist seen in five previous mysteries, does a star turn for a TV series in considering the guilt or innocence of the Victorian Mother Hook. At the same time, Galloway's sometime lover and father of her three-year-old daughter, DCI Nelson, investigates the wrenching case of a mother accused of smothering her baby. Griffiths deftly blends the themes of two women accused of child killing. Then she turns up the heat under this seething cauldron of blame and guilt by having two Norwichchildren kidnapped. A deft blend of death in the past, death in the present, and death chillingly close to occurring.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

January 15, 2014
What connection could the discovery of a notorious child killer's corpse have to a new series of unnerving crimes? Forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway thinks that the body she's unearthed near the walls of Norwich Castle may be that of Mother Hook, a woman who took in unwanted children, possibly sold their bodies and was hanged for murder in 1867. Ruth's publicity-seeking department head is thrilled when the producer of the TV series Women Who Kill decides to add Mother Hook to the lineup. Ruth herself is less pleased even though the job brings her together with Frank Barker, an attractive professor of American history who thinks Mother Hook was innocent. At the same time, DCI Harry Nelson, the father of Ruth's daughter, Kate, is investigating the deaths of a couple's three young children. The first two incidents were written off as crib deaths, but the third looks like murder, and Nelson suspects the parents. As Ruth continues her work on the program, Nelson gets another child-related case. A young girl has been stolen from the house of her wealthy parents, whose nanny spends more time with the children than they do. After a frantic search, the child is found along with a cryptic note from "The Childminder." No sooner is that case resolved than the son of Ruth's friend Judy, a member of Nelson's team, is taken from his sitter, and another note from the Childminder turns up. Judy is married to her high school sweetheart, but her son is the product of her affair with Cathbad, a druid friend of Ruth's who had helped her in past cases (A Dying Fall, 2013, etc.). Could all these cases be related? Griffiths lovingly develops the complicated, often testy relationships between the continuing characters in the course of a mystery perhaps a shade less exciting than her usual fare.

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