The Local History room seems to be empty apart from a coffin on a trestle table and a body lying beside it. She hopes there are no more waxworks or embalmed animals. She feels in the mood for a soothing collection of Norfolk artefacts.

A slight sound, a kind of whispering or fluttering, makes her turn towards Local History. She pauses, feeling like Alice in Wonderland. One says 'New World Collection' and one 'Local History'. There are two ways out of Lord Smith's study. He looks a nasty customer, alive or dead. She notices a brace of guns over the head of the waxwork of Lord Smith. Lord Smith's love of the natural world is shown in his magnificent collection of animals and birds, most of which he shot and stuffed himself.įunny way to show your love of the natural world, by shooting most of it, thinks Ruth. Most of the exhibits in this museum were acquired by Lord Smith in the course of a fascinating life. Percival, Lord Smith 1830 - 1902,adventurer and taxidermist. A rope separates her from the figure and his desk but she leans forward and reads the inscription: ' begins Ruth, before realising that the man's eyes are dusty and one of his arms is missing. A stag's head looms over a painted fireplace and a man sits at a desk, frowning fiercely as he dips his quill into an inkwell. Something must be done to set matters right and lift Nelson out of the clutches of death, but will Ruth be able to muster herself out of a state of guilt and foreboding in order to do what she does best?ĮXCERPT: At the end of the gallery she steps from tile to carpet and, to her surprise, finds herself in a red-walled Victorian study. Tensions build as Nelson's life hangs in the balance. Topham's death seems to be related to other uncanny incidents, including the arcane and suspect methods of a group called the Elginists, which aims to repatriate the museum's extensive collection of Aborigine skulls the untimely demise of the museum's owner, Lord Smith and the sudden illness of DCI Harry Nelson, who Ruth's friend Cathbad believes is lost in The Dreaming - a hallucinogenic state central to some Indigenous Australian beliefs. But when forensic archaelogist Ruth Galloway arrives to supervise, she finds the curator, Neil Topham, dead beside the coffin.

On Halloween night, the Smith Museum in King's Lynn is preparing for an unusual event - the opening of a coffin containing the bones of a medieval bishop. Set in Norfolk, England, A Room Full of Bones embroils, once again, our brainy heroine in a crime tinged by occult forces. Combine a splash of Alan Bradley with a pinch of Kathy Reichs and you have a gripping new Ruth Galloway Mystery - a good-hearted mystery series with a dark edge.

A room full of bones elly griffiths