First Published: 2023
The prologue of the book is set in March 2002, and we see Cathbad with a group of people around a bonfire to celebrate Easter. There seems to be a strange atmosphere between them.
The book then jumps to present day. It is June 2021 and a builder is working on a ship which is going to be reopened as a cafe. When he demolishes a wall, he finds a skeleton and alerts his boss, Edward Spens, who calls Ruth.
Ruth is going through a difficult time. Her university wants to cancel the archaeology course, which will mean losing her job. Apart from that, Nelson is now a free man. Michelle has left him, and he wants Ruth to move in with him, but Ruth doesn't know if that is the right thing to do. So she keeps stalling the conversation.
Ruth goes to check the skeleton that the builder found, and she realises that it is a recent skeleton as its ankle has a metal pin. The police then are called. In the course of teh investigation Nelson and his team discover that the skeleton belongs to a woman called Emily Pickering, who went missing in 2002. Nelson and Doughie go to talk to her parents, and they say that Emily was reading archaelogy at Jude's College in Cambridge, and that Easter she went to a field trip, and to Nelson's surprise the mother says that she blames Professor Leo Ballard and Cathbad for her death. Then Nelson talks to Cathbad, who is recovering after almost dying of Covid, and he tells him that Emily was a charming girl, but one day she just disappeared.
Interesting start. In the last book we left off when Michelle and Nelson were about to talk, and we realise that Michelle has left him. Now that they are free to be together, it is frustrating to see that Ruth has doubts and even though they are together, she is not sure they should live together. I hope they do in the end.
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