The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

This is a first book by this writer. I came accross it when looking for something to read on a train journey back home having finished the book (the previous review) I took with me when I left home a couple of days before. I went to the bookshop at the train station. The cover was interesting, the name unknown, the title intriguing - I needed to have a closer look.

The deciding factors for buying this novel were the setting of the story in Norfolk and the writer being English. If you look at the list of my favourite authors, you see that only one of them is English. Although just now thinking about it I realized that I need to add one more: Manda Scott - more about pers books later, I think.

I read the book without knowing much at all about the setting in Norfolk. I had spent a holiday once on the Norfolk seaside and been pointed out some dangers there. I had also heard of other dangers. So my mind was predisposed to accept some dangerous situations within that landscape, where the main character's home, with its only two neighbours, is on the road which is "frequently flooded in spring and autumn and often impassable by midwinter", on the edge of the Saltmarsh with "these inhospitable marshlands, these desolate mudflats, this lonely, unrelenting view". The meaning of the landscape and the title of the book are explained early on by the main character Ruth Galloway, a forensic archaeologist, as crossing places "between the land and the sea, or between life and death".

The Saltmarsh and the henge at the crossing place are imaginary. However, there was a real seahenge found in Norfolk and the story has similarities with those real events like protests by druids and locals and the controversy about what to do with the find. The story has a beginning in that imaginary find, with all the main characters being present there. And that is when the first child disappeared. 

The book has a prologue. I find prologues most of the time just plain unneccessary. And so I think it is here. The real beginning in chapter one is really good: "Waking is like rising from the dead. The slow climb out of sleep, shapes appearing out of blackness, the alarm clock ringing like the last trump." The biblical reference did not come to mind immediately: "We shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump." It is, however, really fitting as Ruth's parents are revealed to be Born Again Christians "(capitals obligatory)". Having been brought up by born again christians (small letters obligatory for me) and having been one myself in my distant past I find the way this is written about amusing. (Perhaps, I was born again third time as an atheist. I do not remember any one birth, although I do remember how I became an atheist.)

I like the book, I like the story, I like Ruth Galloway. However, there are some things in the book that I find not quite ringing true. I find some aspects of the murderer difficult; the motive for the notes I find a little far fetched; and Ruth's flight into the marshes I find annoying. I do not quite know what to make of them. They are all so central to the story. I would not know how to make the story work without these things.

All in all I think this is a very good first book.