Elly Griffiths - The Stone Circle

Rating: 2/5

Review:
Not for me

I had heard good things about the Ruth Galloway series; this is the first I have read and I’m afraid I didn’t get on well with it. Ruth is a forensic archaeologist in North Norfolk, which provides interesting possibilities as a body is discovered in an archaeological dig site, but these were swamped for me by the sheer weight of extraneous material about complex relationships between a very large number of characters, musings on all sorts of other topics, some slightly tedious stereotypes and some pretty dodgy dialogue.

To be fair, part of my problem may be joining the series at this late stage, but it is part of the skill of a writer to make books accessible to new readers. I found The Stone Circle almost wholly inaccessible; there were far too many characters, far too much extraneous stuff, and not nearly enough focus on plot and structure. Elly Griffiths does generate a very good sense of place and her central characters are quite well painted, but the dialogue is often quite stilted and at times plain clunky. For example, two seasoned police officers have this exchange after Dr Galloway provides some hope that there is information about an absolutely critical part of the investigation:

‘Good old Ruth,’ says Clough. They have been listening on hands-free because Judy is driving. ‘Yes,’ says Judy. ‘If we can find out where [spoiler name] was originally buried, that’ll be a great help.’

“Good old Ruth” is clumsy and wholly out of character for Clough. And as for Judy informing him that what they both know to be vital information “will be a great help”… It really won’t do.

It's not a terrible book, but at about half way I gave up. I really wasn’t very interested in much of it and got very fed up with faintly familiar names cropping up and constantly thinking things like, "Hang on – who was Shona again? Is she married Cathbad? Oh, no – that's...er... So is she married to another character at all, or am I thinking of someone else?" etc. I'm usually quite good at keeping track of characters, but there are so many of them and so much interconnectedness built up from previous stories that I felt a bit lost some of the time. A writer should be able to remind us subtly who is who, especially when there are so many characters; Griffiths doesn’t and for me it wasn’t really worth the effort.

So, I’m out of step with the great majority of reviewers, I’m afraid. They loved it, so don’t let me put you off, but this really isn’t for me.

(My thanks to Quercus for an ARC via NetGalley.)