A soap opera with a pedestrian mystery

Domenica de Rosa writes mysteries as Elly Griffiths, fifteen in the Ruth Galloway series. An interviewer pointed out that readers love her characters—maybe more than the mystery—and asked if that is a key to her appeal. 

Griffiths agreed. “Character—definitely. Funnily enough I’ve been writing about Wilkie Collins. He said character and humor are the most important things in writing. I think that’s right. I do think that character is plot. I mean you can have the cleverest plot but if you don’t have characters that people relate to then there’s no tension and suspense. It matters because tension and suspense come from caring about what’s going to happen to those characters. I think fiction is great at relationships between people’s chosen families, not blood family.” 

The Last Remains is reportedly the last in the Ruth Galloway series. (Griffiths has another mystery series set in Brighton, plus three stand-alone books and four children's books.) It is, I think, more family drama than mystery although there is a body and Ruth and her young daughter are put in danger by the villain, so that makes it a mystery.

Ruth, in addition to being an archeology professor, helps the police as forensic archeologist. She's called when a builder discovers a twenty-year-old skeleton behind a wall in a shop he is renovating (the skeleton has a modern metal plate in an ankle). The police are able to identify the skeleton fairy quickly as a young archeology student who vanished twenty years earlier. What happened to her and who hid her inside the wall? One twist: had her body been hidden immediately after her death the decaying stench would have given her away; the skeleton had been moved from somewhere else.

Complications on top of complications. Ruth's university is eliminating the archeology department and her job. The estranged wife of Ruth's long-time lover, Nelson, wants to return to the couples' home with their 5-year-old-son. Nelson is father of Ruth's 15-year-old daughter and is head of the local police,  A good friend of theirs, Michael Malone aka Cathbad, was somehow involved with the dead student. Late in the book Cathbad disappears and although he's been helpful in earlier books and lives with a police officer the circumstances are suspicious.

While I found the mystery thin and the personal stories pedestrian, I admire Griffiths's ability to keep in motion all the plates she's set spinning without dropping one. She gives us access to the internal states and thoughts of different characters without drawing attention to what she's doing. I'm not so sure about referring to earlier books (cases), although it may give series readers a shock of pleasure, but it is clever to have a child character show up in The Last Remains as an exceptionally helpful adult. Griffiths fans will enjoy The Last Remains. Newbies should start earlier in the series.