The Night Hawks (Dr Ruth Galloway) by Elly Griffiths
| The Night Hawks (Dr Ruth Galloway) by Elly Griffiths | |
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| Category: Crime | |
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Reviewer: Sue Magee
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| Summary: It's the thirteenth book in the Dr Ruth Galloway series and she's now back in Norfolk and head of department. An excellent read. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 368 | Date: February 2021 |
| Publisher: Quercus | |
| External links: Author's website | |
| ISBN: 978-1787477803 | |
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Shortlisted for Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year 2022
September 2019
The night hawks are metal detectorists and they're out on Blakeney Point where they suspect that there's treasure to be found. Unfortunately, the youngest of the group, twenty-one-year-old Troy Evans, finds the body of a man floating on the incoming tide. After pulling it ashore, they call the police. DCI Nelson thinks that it's probably the body of an asylum seeker but there's no evidence of any activity to be had from the coastguard. The dead man turns out to be Jem Taylor, a North Norfolk man recently released from prison.
The detectorists did stumble on some treasure and it looks as though it's going to be exciting, particularly for David Brown the new lecturer in the archaeology department at the University of North Norfolk. He's taken Ruth Galloway's place as she's now head of department in place of Phil Trent who's recently taken early retirement. Ruth's beginning to realise that Phil was right when he complained about all the paperwork he had to get through. She's also finding that although she was the person who recruited David Brown, he's deeply annoying. Whatever she's doing, he seems to be there.
And then there's a double death near Sherringham. It appears that Dr Douglas Noakes killed his wife, Linda, and then turned the gun on himself. David Clough, who's now a DI and who's moved away from North Norfolk, would have described it as a DODI - the dead one did it - but something just doesn't seem quite right to Nelson. It's about to get worse, though: one of the metal detectorists, fifty-eight-year-old Alan White, is found murdered in the excavation trench at Blakeney Point.
Nelson has a nagging problem: Superintendent Jo Archer (super Jo around the office) is trying to persuade him to retire. It's not that he can't do the job, it's that she's counting the number of staff she could employ if she didn't have to pay an expensive DCI. Nelson's determined that he's not going to retire, so he's having to go out of his way to avoid super Jo, fearful that there'll be yet another discussion to be got through.
This is the thirteenth Dr Ruth Galloway book and I only realised how long this series has been running when I noticed that Ruth's daughter, Kate, whose birth we saw early in the series is now ten-years-old. It's still remarkably fresh. In The Night Hawks we see illicit drug trials, bronze-age buried treasure and the effects of an abusive childhood and it's all expertly knitted together in a brilliantly-written story. At one point, Nelson muses about his frustration at a certain point in an investigation: he's wondering if the perpetrator is going to get away with it. I know exactly how he felt! I usually have someone pencilled in as the wrong 'un but this time I had no idea whatsoever and I was shocked when I realised who it was, despite the fact that the clues had all been there. It was an excellent read.
For a long time now the Ruth Galloway series has been one of my favourite police procedurals and I'd like to thank the publishers for making a copy available to the Bookbag.
Griffiths evokes North Norfolk perfectly: if you'd like to try some walking in the area and see some beautiful paintings we can recommend On My Way: Norfolk Coastal Walks by John Hurst.
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