The Janus Stone

Ruth Galloway is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich to make way for a housing development, uncover the bones of a child beneath a doorway - minus the skull. Is it some ritual sacrifice or just plain straightforward murder? DCI Harry Nelson would like to find out - and fast. It turns out the house was once a children's home. Nelson traces the Catholic priest who used to run the home. Father Hennessey tells him that two children did go missing from the home forty years before - a boy and a girl. They were never found. When carbon dating proves that the child's bones predate the home and relate to a time when the house was privately owned, Ruth is drawn ever more deeply into the case. But as spring turns into summer it becomes clear that someone is trying very hard to put her off the scent by frightening her half to death...

ISBN 1849161585   DEWEY edition DC22 ISBN13 9781849161589 (What's this?)   Pages 320 Publisher Quercus Publishing Plc   Published in London Imprint Quercus Publishing Plc   Height (mm) 234 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 153 Publication date 04 Feb 2010   Academic level General DEWEY 823.92

'Her lead character is engagingly awkward enough to be perversely appealing ... on this evidence Griffiths has wrought something of a miracle' The Times. 'It's always a pleasure when an author's second book lives up to the promise of the first, and this is certainly true of the second in Griffiths's series... There's a satisfying meaty plot - family secrets, insanity and ancient mythology, both pagan and Roman - but it's Griffiths's dryly humorous writing and the appeal of her two main characters that make these books such a treat ... More please.' Guardian. '...it is topically terrifying enough but far more so when it is combined with pagan rites ... bone-chilling stuff' Times.

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