The Ghost Fields by Elly Griffiths

16^th July 2023.

This series simply gets better with each book. It’s no mean feat when the bar was set so high from the start, but like the previous outings for Dr Ruth Galloway, she’s soon immersed in another original and different plot when a plane from the Second World War is uncovered at a building site. Inside the cockpit, there’s body with a bullet hole in the head. Only he’s not the pilot.

It’s the start of another mystery that centres on the Blackstock family, who have lived on the same land for centuries. Three generations occupy their stately home, along with a host of family secrets and conflicts that test DCI Harry Nelson and his team.

Ruth, on the other hand, is involved with a TV company from the USA, which wants to make a film about the body and the air force base that occupied the land during the war.

It’s a tense and twisting story where the conflicts of the past collide with present issues, leading to a second murder on Blackstock land.

The main characters have their own issues to contend with as relationships become more complex and difficult. While it’s not essential to read the previous novels in the series to enjoy this one, you’ll miss out on the character developments, the relationships and the everyday lives that ebb and flow in the background, casting their own challenges into every investigation.

And when the murders are solved, the challenges remain, testing the loyalty and resolve of the characters as they struggle on. It’s the characters and their lives that lift these novels and make them more memorable. And when Ruth sees something she wishes she hadn’t seen, who knows how she will deal with it?

Description

A bullet-ridden body is unearthed from a buried WW2 plane – but the body isn’t from WW2. Dr Ruth Galloway, forensic archaeologist, must discover who the victim was, and who put him there.

When DCI Harry Nelson calls Ruth Galloway in to investigate a body found inside a buried fighter plane, she quickly realizes that the skeleton couldn’t possibly be the pilot. DNA tests identify the man as Fred Blackstock, a local aristocrat who had been reported dead at sea.

Events are further complicated by a TV company that wants to make a film about Norfolk’s deserted air force bases, the so-called Ghost Fields, which have been partially converted into a pig farm run by one of the younger remaining Blackstocks.

Then human bones are found on the farm and, as the greatest storm Norfolk has seen for decades brews in the distance, another Blackstock is attacked. Can the team outrace the rising flood to find the killer?