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I am rereading A Room Full of Bones, fourth in a series of murder mysteries by Elly Griffiths, featuring Ruth Galloway, a forensic archeologist. Ruth teaches at a small university, but, as the local expert on bones, keeps getting called away to help solve murders. There are at least a dozen books so far. A Room Full of Bones takes hold quickly, immersing the reader in the lives, and deaths, of the inhabitants of a small city in England. (This despite my daughter's complaint that no one had died in the first 50 pages of the first book in the series, The Crossing Places.) That's not true of A Room Full of Bones, in which the curator of a tiny local museum turns up dead, and possibly murdered, almost right away. The murders continue. Persons unknown have taken the movement to repatriate the bones of native Australians, stolen several generations before, a bridge too far. Or is there a bit of misdirection going on? There is always one more twist, right to the end.

Ruth lives with her one-year-old daughter in a small house in the midst of a vest coastal marshland. The landscape is full of treacherous bogs, quicksand, and pools that fill rapidly when the tide is rising. She loves it there. The incongruity of a pudgy middle-aged professor living out in the middle of nowhere makes Ruth more three-dimensional.

The child's father is a DCI with the local police department, happily married to a glamorous woman, and with two other daughters (both teenagers). Nelson is supposed to stay away from Ruth, in order to preserve his marriage. However, because there are always murders, and they frequently involve archaeology, this is hard to do.

A Room Full of Bones, and the entire series, is quite charming to my American sensibilities, because the books were very clearly written for a British audience. Phrases and words that are obviously in common use in England pop up everywhere, adding one more level of mystery to the narrative, and they are never explained. For instance, what is a bacon butty? Is it like what we call a bacon egg and cheese biscuit in this part of the world? I could google it of course, but where's the charm in that?

Why am I rereading this book right now, especially if I have started with the fourth in the series? We moved to a new town last fall, Baton Rouge Louisiana, and my wife discovered about a month ago that there is a mystery readers book club. It meets in the main library, scarcely far enough from our house to be worth using the car to get there, and the next meeting is tomorrow. The assignment this month was to read a mystery involving archeology. I thought about Agatha Christie's Hercole Poirot, but the Ruth Galloway books might be less familiar to the other members of the club. We shall see.