The Frozen People: An Ali Dawson Mystery
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By Elly Griffiths
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1 review
SOME MURDERS CAN’T BE SOLVED IN JUST ONE LIFETIME.
From the No 1 bestselling author, a brand new series with a brand new heroine to fall in love with. Ali Dawson is as colourful as her bright red hair – warm, funny, forthright – and mother to a grown son, Finn. Ali works on cold cases, crimes so old, the joke goes, they are almost frozen.
What most people don’t know is that Ali and the team travel back in time to complete their researches – a process pioneered by the mysterious Italian physicist, Serafina Pelligrini.
So far the team has only ventured a few years or decades back but Ali’s boss has a new assignment for her. He wants her to step back to 1850, the heart of the Victorian Age, to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric great-grandfather of Tory MP Isaac Templeton, her son’s boss.
To ready herself for the challenge ahead, Ali researches the Victorian era. She learns that Cain Templeton was part of a sinister group called The Collectors, the rumour being that you had to kill a woman to become a member. Duly prepared, she arrives in London in January 1850 in the middle of a freezing winter. She is directed to a house inhabited by artists, and is greeted by a dead woman at her feet.
Soon she finds herself in extreme danger. Even worse – she appears to be stuck, unable to make her way back to the present, to the life she loves and to her son, Finn.
The Frozen People is a lavish, cleverly plotted mystery with a cast of new characters to get to know and love.
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Elly Griffiths is one of my favourite authors and when she closed her Ruth Galloway series last year I really hoped she’d come up with a new series that would be just as good. With this I think she has, even though when I read the plot summary I wasn’t sure I'd enjoy it, because the whole idea behind it sounded so bonkers! Nonetheless, I downloaded this as soon as it became available, and I was caught up in the story from chapter one.
Ali Dawson is a police detective working as part of a cold case team based in London. The cases they deal with are so old they could, indeed, be described as frozen, but what isn’t public knowledge is that the team is working on a secret project to develop time travel. (I told you it was bonkers!)
Ali’s son, Finn, is a special adviser to cabinet minister, Isaac Templeton, who is writing his family history. He approaches Ali’s team asking them to help him clear the name of one of his Victorian ancestors, Cain Templeton, who had been a well-known patron of the arts. However, it is also believed that Cain had belonged to a sinister group known as The Collectors, whose initiation rite had required each member to kill a woman.
In order to investigate, Ali agrees to travel back to 1850 where she gets enmeshed in a mystery she wasn’t expecting. More alarmingly, she then can’t get back to the present day, where Finn has become a suspect in a murder investigation.
My verdict
Elly Griffiths isn’t just a great storyteller, she makes her characters seem completely alive. In this new series, Ali is a wonderful protagonist and, in fact, all the characters are varied and interesting, across both the timelines of the story. I found I couldn’t put this book down because I was desperate to find out what happened next.
Another stand-out feature as far as I’m concerned, was the attention to detail. From the clothes Ali had to wear in order to blend in with life in Victorian London, to her struggles to get by without the modern technology she has become so used to. Everything was so vivid and believable.
The pace kept me reading and I couldn’t wait to find out how the story would unfold. Of course it’s a crazy plot, but that doesn’t matter because the whole premise is so imaginative. After all, most people would like to time travel to see how peopled really lived in the past and to trace their ancestors. I didn’t guess the killer, it came as complete surprise. I will definitely be looking out for the next one in this series and this definitely earns 5 Stars from me.
Review by: Norfolk Gal, Oundle Crime
