Fiction Reviews
The Frozen People
Elly Griffiths, Quercus, £22, hrdbk, 343pp, ISBN 978-1-529-43333-3
Ali Dawson and her cold case team investigate crimes so old, they're frozen - or so their inside joke goes. Most people don't know that they travel back in time to complete their research. The latest assignment sees Ali venture back farther than they have dared before: to 1850s London in order to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric great-grandfather of MP Isaac Templeton. Rumour has it that Cain was part of a sinister group called The Collectors; to become a member, you had to kill a woman. Fearing for her safety in the middle of a freezing Victorian winter, Ali finds herself stuck in time, unable to make her way back to her life, her beloved colleagues, and her son, Finn, who suddenly finds himself in legal trouble in the present day.
Well, this is very interesting, and I’m sure my wife will be delighted with a new book, nay, new series from the prolific pen, or make that 'keyboard', of Elly Griffiths, author of the Ruth Galloway novels of which there are fifteen. Griffith is also the author of The Brighton Mysteries consisting of seven novels, four other crime novels, one short story collection, and a non-fiction photographic journey through Ruth Galloway’s Norfolk. That last non-fiction book aside, all of her previous work has been in the crime or mystery genres, so this is something completely different for Griffiths by combining crime with time travel.
Here, main character, Detective Sergeant Ali Dawson, works for the MET Cold Case Unit who are based in the East End of London under the seemingly innocuous misnomer the “Department of Logistics”, and use time gates to travel back in time to solve unsolved crimes. This far, they have only been travelling over short time periods, but now Ali finds herself in 1850s London to investigate some murders that have present-day ramifications. Anyone familiar with Griffiths’ work will know that she does the research, so her Victorian London is very convincing and so is lead character, Ali. We quickly get inside her head and learn what motivates her and what concerns her.
One of her major worries is her son, Finn, who works as a Ministerial Advisor for prominent MP, and Minister for Justice, Isaac Templeton, and would you believe it, that very MP is the great-great-grandson of Cain Templeton, a member of The Collectors, whom Ali is investigating to see if prospective members really did kill women to become a member of the club. Isaac is writing the family history and would like to clear his ancestor’s name. What perhaps is less convincing is the actual mechanics of how the time travel works, with it pretty much being glossed over in a case of “Oh, it would be too difficult to explain, so I’m not going to bother”, then, again Ray Bradbury said that he was more interested in what powered the people rather than the rockets, so Griffiths is in good company.
If the time travel theory is a little sketchy, other parts of the story aren’t, with maybe Griffiths juggling too many plot balls at the same time meaning that things are really travelling at breakneck speed towards the end of the novel, but those are the negatives. The positives are her writing style, her believable characters as she fleshes out the other members of Ali’s team including: her boss, Geoff; colleague, John, who is a great homicide detective but not so great on the mental health front; Serafina Jones, the Italian physicist who discovered the time travel method; Dina who is the IT guru; and Bud, a physics expert. With five members in the team, expect some lively banter between them. The convincing Victorian setting provides some eye-opening moments for Ali and also some humour as she is a very (three times married) modern woman who has to bite her tongue at times to blend in. Of course, there are some plot twists, and an obvious (considering this is book one in a new series) set up for a sequel. The Frozen People is very readable, and coming in at 343 pages told over 44 chapters, which alternate between the past and the present, it is exactly my sort of fast-paced book. Fans of Griffiths’ previous work should lap this up, but will the speculative aspect be too much for them? Time, ahem, will tell.
Ian Hunter
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