Boiled human bones have been found in Norwich's web of underground tunnels. When Dr Ruth Galloway discovers they are recent - the boiling not the medieval curiosity she thought - DCI Nelson has a murder enquiry on his hands. Meanwhile, DS Judy Johnson is investigating the disappearance of a local rough sleeper. The only trace of her is the rumour that she's gone 'underground'. This might be a figure of speech, but with the discovery of the bones and the rumours both Ruth and the police have heard of a vast network of old chalk-mining tunnels under King's Lynn, home to a vast community of rough sleepers, the clues point in only one direction. Local academic Martin Kellerman knows all about the tunnels and their history - but can his assertions of cannibalism and ritual killing possibly be true? As the weather gets hotter, tensions rise. A local woman goes missing and the police are under attack. Ruth and Nelson must unravel the dark secrets of The Underground and discover just what gruesome secrets lurk at its heart - before it claims another victim.
Barbara Murray has gone missing, but what has happened to her and who did it? Bones have been found beneath Norwich, but who do they belong to and why were they killed? Who is murdering homeless people and does this have anything to do with the missing woman Barbara Murray? A action packed thriller set in the heart of Norwich.
This was an intense thriller which always kept you guessing as to who the villain was. When you thought you had guessed who it was it would lead you in a completely different direction. It seemed like every character had dark sinister secrets. You thought someone was a good guy and it turned out they might have been someone a bit darker with a bad background. Every character added a lot of different elements and skills to the storyline.
All of the police officers, such as Nelson, Judy, Tanya and Clough, would stop at nothing to find the missing women and find the murderer of two homeless men. They were very brave as they never knew where the investigation was going to take them or what dangers they would face when they got to the end of the line. At times the case often became personal for a few of the characters. Ruth was also a great character as she just wanted to find out the truth about the bones buried beneath the city and she got to join the missing persons case towards the end of the novel.
Some characters were a bit annoying such as Jo and Leo. Jo was the Superintendent and she thought she was all powerful bossing all the officers around. They didn't like that so would sometimes call her names behind her back and not listen to any of her rules. Leo thought he was the greatest director in the world when he clearly wasn't. So he made some plays which people came to see but that didn't make him anything special. His plays also seemed really weird as his Alice's Adventures Under Ground was more like people taking a trip on acid, the play was that weird from what I read in the novel.
The action scenes happened sporadically throughout the novel and weren't just situated in one area of the novel. The language was easy to read. As Ruth was an archaeologist Elly Griffiths didn't use lots of hard to read language to talk about Ruth's job. I was scared that there would be lots of terms or phrases that I wouldn't understand when it came to reading about Ruth's job and her latest case, but there wasn't.
Overall, I gave this novel 4/5 stars. It was an intense and thrilling read. You were always asking yourself who could the bad guy actually be. Turned out a lot of characters in this novel had bad parts about them. I hope to read more novels in this series in the future. Unfortunately I haven't read the previous 8 novels but I will be picking them up at some point in the future. They really are captivating reads and leave you asking a lot of questions. Questions which will only be answered when you get to the end of the novel.
Rating 4/5
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