Ruth is asked to be present at the opening of a coffin in the local museum, owned by the Smith family, so she can assess the contents. The coffin has been recently found, and is thought to contain the bones of a mediaeval bishop, Augustine. Ruth turns up at the appointed hour, only to discover the museum's curator lying prone by the coffin. Detective Inspector Harry Nelson is called in to investigate, realising that Ruth's involvement in this case is not going to make it easy for him to work on it. Funny way to show your love of the natural world, by shooting most of it, thinks Ruth. She notices a brace of guns over the head of the waxwork of Lord Smith. He looks a nasty customer, alive or dead. As Ruth becomes further embroiled in the case, she must decide where her loyalties lie - a choice that her very survival depends on.

In her ghostly story of silent curses and bad karma, Griffith unfolds a complex chorus of disbelieving hope, where a man points the bone of fire and the devil is thought to embark on revenge as he shimmers in and out of that other dimension. The strange tableau that appears within the As DI Harry Nelson and his team descend to investigate the death of museum curator Neil Topham, Ruth finds herself in the unenviable position of being the person who found the body (this is starting to become a habit!). The investigation leads Sergeants Judy Johnson and Dave Clough to the nearby racing stables owned by Lord Danforth Smith, whose aristocratic ancestor is celebrated by the museum in which the body was found.I love Kate in this book. It’s so enjoyable to see her grown. She’s obviously smart but not unrealistically portrayed. She mostly seems her age. I think in future books she’ll be even more fun as she ages and can even more fully express herself, but I do already love her character. At the end of book one I was worried I’d stop liking the books but she and Ruth’s changes to accommodate her makes me love the books even more. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Waitomo District Library for the loan of A Room Full of Bonesby Elly Griffiths for review. All opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own personal opinions. A Room Full of Bones is another engrossing instalment in Elly Griffiths' series featuring archaeologist Ruth Galloway. The book opens tantalisingly with the planned opening of a recently unearthed medieval coffin in a Norfolk museum, although before the festivities can get underway an unexpected modern death occurs! A ROOM FULL OF BONES is a pleasing read, perhaps tending more to the "cosy" style of crime fiction than earlier instalments in the series, but is certainly exciting and with a more satisfying crime and detection element this time round as the plot is more clever and more robust. I could have done with reading more about Ruth's professional life and slightly less about her motherhood bliss and details of her domestic arrangements, but I am sure that as Kate gets older and more independent, Ruth will have more time for trouble. I look forward to finding out. The first thing I have to say about this book is that is soooo boring and so do yourselves a favour and just DON'T read it especially if you are fan of crime/mystery novels!

Ruth and Detective Inspector Nelson are forced to cross paths once again when he's called in to investigate the murder, and their past tensions are reignited. Each mystery provides a complete plot line and an interesting archaeological angle, but it is very much the relationships that keep me engaged in this series. Will Ruth stay single? Will Harry's marriage survive his wife's discovery that he is Kate's father? Will Harry and Ruth find a way to communicate about their child that doesn't ruffle everyone further? There are even the other police officers, whose private lives are starting to form part of the fabric of each book. In this thrilling mystery, “brilliant, feisty, independent” forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway and DCI Harry Nelson investigate a seemingly cursed collection of Aboriginal skulls that are causing people to die from a mysterious fever—and the next person to fall ill is Nelson himself ( Richmond Times-Dispatch). Neil doesn’t know if they are joking or not. Do policemen have unions? But he stands aside as the two men shoulder their burden again and carry it, watched by myriad glass eyes, through the Natural History Room and into a smaller room decorated with a mural of Norfolk Through The Ages. There is a trestle table waiting in the centre of the room and, on this, the policemen lower the coffin.Ruth is depressed and overweight and she doesn't feel she's a good mother and she loves the depressing saltmarsh where she lives and she likes her job and blah blah. Yes, we get it. A coffin containing the remains of Bishop Augustine Smith is being moved into the Smith Museum from its original burial place outside the walls of St. Mary's Church. In the past the Bishop was thought to have been buried inside Norwich Cathedral. Lord Danforth Smith couldn't be more pleased to welcome his long deceased ancestor to his museum but it seems he is alone with these feelings for he has a growing number of those in opposition to this transference and more than this...much more. DCI Harry Nelson is called in to investigate, thrusting him into Ruth’s path once more. When threatening letters come to light, events take an even more sinister turn. But as Ruth’s friends become involved, where will her loyalties lie? As her convictions are tested, Ruth and Nelson must discover how Aboriginal skulls, drug smuggling, and the mystery of the “Dreaming” hold the answers to these deaths, as well as the keys to their own survival.

Ruth is asked to attend the opening of a recently discovered Bishop's coffin. When she gets to the museum holding the event, however, she finds the curator dead by the coffin. Although on the face of it his death is by natural causes, Nelson and Ruth have their suspicions. I have read and enjoyed the first three books in this series by Elly Griffiths, about forensic archeologist Dr Ruth Galloway. But this one was a disappointment. The storyline is ridiculous, the characters are stereotypes who behave in the silliest of ways, the writing is clunky and the pace is sluggish. It simply doesn't live up to its predecessors. If you're wondering if you need to have read the other books in the series, the answer is no: however if you haven't read them, they're better books than this one! I was also worried about how vegans and animal rights people were portrayed and it was mixed, though nothing bad was said about the food, and it didn’t end up reflecting on animal rights vegans quite a poorly as I’d feared, and wasn’t completely unrealistic given that there are subcultures in the vegan/ar movement. I suppose just to have this content in a regular book I appreciated: vegan food, vegans, animal rights activists. IN a non-vegan promoting or “vegan” or “animal rights” book this is a big deal. There are two ways out of Lord Smith's study. One says 'New World Collection' and one 'Local History'. She pauses, feeling like Alice in Wonderland. A slight sound, a kind of whispering or fluttering, makes her turn towards Local History. She feels in the mood for a soothing collection of Norfolk artefacts. She hopes there are no more waxworks or embalmed animals.

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There is no way you get to PhD level without hearing about NAGPRA and the issue of repatriation of human remains belonging to Native American and Australian Aborigine tribes. It's a sensitive issue and a very interesting one, and I heard about it for the first time during the last year of my BA. Again lots of copying and pasting from wikipedia, lots of generalization, and nothing else.

Percival, Lord Smith 1830 - 1902,adventurer and taxidermist. Most of the exhibits in this museum were acquired by Lord Smith in the course of a fascinating life. Lord Smith's love of the natural world is shown in his magnificent collection of animals and birds, most of which he shot and stuffed himself. I do love Ruth and so many old and new characters are particularly interesting. Some people and events seemed so real to me I had urges to look them up. A Room Full of Bones also develops ongoing character storylines and relationships, including that between Ruth and DI Nelson, who is the father of her one-year-old daughter, Kate. Nelson's wife, Michelle having become aware of this fact in the closing lines of the previous book has created inevitable complications in Ruth and Harry’s professional and personal relationship. Meanwhile, Cathbad’s covert love affair with married DS Judy Johnson also comes to Ruth's attention for the first time and revelations towards the end of the book indicate fraught times ahead for this couple also. Yes, instead of Nelson and Ruth being on the job, the book had a lot of focus of the owners of the museum, the Smith family. Many many scenes were written from their point of view. I’m not saying they were boring, I’m just saying I would have rathered reading these things from Nelson or Ruth’s point of view. A Room Full of Bones is probably the strongest in the series thus far when it comes to the mystery plot. It introduces quite a lot of interesting crime/mystery aspects, all seemingly unrelated until Griffiths quite cleverly weaves them together.

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Ruth Galloway's] an uncommon, down-to-earth heroine whose acute insight, wry humor, and depth of feeling make her a thoroughly engaging companion." -- Erin Hart, Agatha and Anthony Award nominated author of Haunted Ground and Lake of Sorrows The curator was a drug dealer and a group demanding the return of the remains of Indigenous Australians, taken be force to England in Victorian times, for proper burials could also be involved. Judy Johnson and Dave Clough, who loves the Godfather films and frequently intones 'I'm gonna make you an offer you can't refuse' when alone with a mirror, play larger roles in this book, and Cathbad continues to both intrigue and infuriate Nelson. I love encountering new words and this book presented me with "murmuration," which is defined as "the phenomenon that results when hundreds, sometimes thousands, of starlings fly in swooping, intricately coordinated patterns through the sky." Beautiful! A second dramatic death draws together the curious results of Ruth’s archaeological examination of Bishop Augustine’s remains with the Slaughter Hill racing stables and a series of threatening anonymous letters that Lord Smith has received. The imagery of snakes is common to both medieval Christianity and Australian dreamtime stories and Elly Griffiths utilises this to full spooky effect has more than one character experiences terrifying hallucinations and portents of death. Are there paranormal elements in play, or is there a more prosaic explanation for what's going on?