The Chalk Pit

Character-Driven Intrigue and Subterfuge

The Chalk Pit by Elly Griffiths is the ninth in her Dr Ruth Galloway series.

A light and easy read, packed with real characters, subtle humour, an entertaining plot and some truly dastardly behaviour. A great stand-alone novel and perfect if you enjoy reading a series and watching the characters’ backstories develop.

Synopsis

After a surveyor investigates the groundworks of a subterranean restaurant in Norwich, building work grinds to a halt. He finds a series of old chalk passageways and a selection of human bones, so the police call local archaeologist Ruth Galloway to investigate. The bones aren’t as old as the developer hoped. They also look as if somebody has cooked them and cracked them open. Signs of cannibalism in Norwich?

In the old port of King’s Lynn, some forty miles away, a homeless woman called Babs has gone missing. A couple of days later, Aftershave Eddie — the rough sleeper who reported Bab’s disappearance — is found dead at the entrance to the police station, a knife wound to his neck. If that isn’t enough to contend with, a young mother has vanished. The only clue that the police have is a rumour that the homeless woman has “gone underground”. Where underground, the tunnels in Norwich?

Review

Elly Griffiths tells a compelling story, building momentum as women disappear and bodies pile up. The pace becomes gripping, even frantic, when a police officer’s fiancé disappears.

Griffiths’ style is conversational, not dark. She was given the Mary Higgins Clark award for her work. The criteria for the award include “a protagonist who is a nice young woman and a story that has no on-scene violence, four-letter words or explicit sex scenes.”

The strength of Griffiths’ writing comes from her character-driven plots. She spins out the life of the police station like a television drama as the intricacies of the police officers’ relationships are gamely revealed, with a fine eye for gossip. At the same time, Griffiths builds the identities of the homeless. She explains their backstories subtly, resisting the urge to parody them as saints or sinners.

All this is done with dry humour that adds credibility to her characters.

She’s unmarried but, as she confided early on to Judy, ‘not short of offers’. Nelson often thinks that Jo is not nearly as attractive as she thinks she is but, as with all these things, her insane self-belief rubs off on others, and after a week King’s Lynn police were treating her as if she were Helen of Troy.

The Chalk Pit Elly Griffiths

The twin centre action between Norwich and Kings Lynn is implausible, particularly for anybody driving the tractor and caravan-strewn road between them. Surely the Norfolk Constabulary employs more than one Detective Inspector. The criminal’s motivations are even more unlikely, but this is crime fiction.

If you are looking for a story that is long on characterisation, easy to read and full of humour, this book is for you.

Excerpt

Nelson drives back to the station in a foul temper. He feels no compulsion to stay in third gear in order to keep below the speed limit, nor does he check his speed regularly or ease off the accelerator, all of which are recommended in the workbook which formed part of his ‘National Speed Awareness Course Pack’. Instead, he takes pride in breaking almost all the traffic rules in the short journey from the Portakabin to the police station. He screeches into the car park, parks at an angle and slams in through the back door.

The desk sergeant, a doughty war horse called Tom Henty, hears the door slam and calls, ‘DCI Nelson?’ 

Nelson opens the connecting door to the reception area. ‘What is it, Tom?’

‘You’ve got a visitor. Two visitors.’

‘Who is it?’

‘One’s Aftershave Eddie. I’ve put him in Interview Room 1 because people started to complain. The other is a young woman called Grace Miller.’

Nelson groans. Aftershave Eddie – so called because he is known to drink any substance containing alcohol – is a homeless man who sometimes sleeps in the police station porch. If Nelson sees him, he usually gives him money to buy a meal even though he knows that the meal will be entirely liquid. He used to encourage Eddie to contact a charity for the homeless but the man always refused, with some dignity. DS Judy Johnson has tried even harder, contacting charities and even booking Eddie into a hostel. But Eddie always replies that he is a free man and beholden to nobody. Nelson respects this even though he lives in fear of coming across Eddie’s lifeless body in the street one day.

So what is Eddie, who once told him that ‘with my family you stay clear of the police’, doing in Interview Room 1?

The Chalk Pit Elly Griffiths