The Frozen People

Elly Griffiths

WHEN bestselling author Elly Griffiths signed off on a high last year from her long-running and critically acclaimed Ruth Galloway Mysteries, starring a forensic archaeologist, her army of adoring fans always anticipated that she would return with a new writing venture.

What no one could have imagined was that her comeback crime opener would not just rewind the clock to the year 1850, but feature a feisty, feminist police detective able to time-travel back to London’s murky Victorian past to solve a dark and disturbing mystery.

The Frozen People – first book of the ambitious and daringly original Ali Dawson Mystery series – delivers a fascinating cold case conundrum with an exciting blend of chills, thrills and satirical humour, and a brilliantly conceived genre twist which allows a simmering mystery to unfold between two very different worlds. Staying one step ahead of the game, in both the present and the past, is the ostentatiously 21^st century Ali Dawson, a sassy and smart-talking 50-year-old detective sergeant with hair dyed the same shade as a London bus, a nose ring, a serious caffeine habit, three ex-husbands, a son who works in politics, and a much-loved but perpetually angry Siamese cat called Terry.

Ali’s job is to investigate cases that are ‘so cold they are frozen’ and travel back in time – via an ingenious process that ‘moves atoms in space’ – to dig out the truth on murders that ‘can’t be solved in just one lifetime.’ 

So hop aboard time and space and join Ali and her team in the early days of their time-travelling capabilities as they tackle a case dating all the way back to 1850 and involving the great-great grandfather of the current Tory justice minister Isaac Templeton.

Ali – a self-confessed inverted snob firmly entrenched in her working class roots – ostensibly spends her days in the Department of Logistics but what most people don’t know is that she is part of a top secret special team which travels back in time to complete their research... a process pioneered by the mysterious Italian physicist, Serafina Pelligrini.

Pelligrini – known within the team as Jones – has found a way of juggling atoms in space and time and filling the created gap with a chosen person.  So far, the team has only ventured back a few years or decades but Ali’s boss, DCI Geoff Bastian, has a new and more far-reaching assignment for her. He wants her to step back to the heart of the Victorian age to try to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric

ancestor of Isaac Templeton. Cain was a wealthy man suspected of murdering three women and when he died, accusations of his possible crimes left an unwelcome ‘stain’ on the Templetons’ family history.

The case has an added complication for Ali because Isaac Templeton is her ‘special adviser’ son Finn’s boss but she prepares herself for the challenge ahead by undertaking research into the Victorian era. And it is through her investigations that she learns that Cain Templeton, a patron of the arts, was part of a sinister group called The Collectors, the rumour being that you had to kill a woman to become a member.

Armed with her research and a full Victorian makeover, Ali duly arrives in London in January of 1850... the middle of a particularly freezing cold winter. She is directed to a house inhabited by artists but is met by the body of artist’s model Ettie Moran and the menacing presence of Cain Templeton.

Soon Ali is in extreme danger and even worse, the thick snow has buried the exact spot where she was to be transported back to the future. Stuck in 1850 and unable to make her way back to the present, Ali fears she might never again live the life she loves... or see her beloved son.

Griffiths (pictured above) has a well-earned reputation as an accomplished and elegant crime writer with the gift of delivering clever, character-driven murder mysteries infused with energising fun, social observation, a superbly evoked sense of time and place, and the kind of immaculate detective work and plotting which harks back to the Golden Age of authors like Agatha Christie and Josephine Tey.

And it’s a talent she employs with extraordinary results in this ingenious new series which weaves between past and present, creating a unique tension and holding an exciting future potential to visit some intriguing, dangerous and atmospheric corners of history.

Bestriding the two timelines is, of course, Ali, a thoroughly modern and opinionated woman gloriously juxtaposed with censorious mid-19th century society, and just one of a team of exquisitely honed characters who play out their parts against an immaculately portrayed backdrop in which topical and historical issues are explored with a large helping of dark humour.

Expect a mid-plot curveball which adds extra impetus to the high-stakes plot, a slice of time-travelling futuristic fantasy rendered so adeptly that it is almost credible, and a dramatic dénouement guaranteed to leave readers guessing until the next instalment... wickedly entertaining!
(Quercus, hardback, £22)