Friday Memes: The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths

 Happy Friday everybody!

Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Rose City Reader. The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Beginning:

A light breeze runs through the long grass at the top of the hill. Close up, the land looks ordinary, just heather and a coarse pasture with the occasional white stone standing out like a signpost. But if you were to fly up above these unremarkable hills you would be able to see circular raised banks and darker rectangles amongst the greens and browns -- sure sign that this land has been occupied many, many times before.

Friday 56:

The woman next to her snored continually, but unevenly, so Ruth was unable to fit the noise into a soothing background rhythm. She had nothing to read and eventually this need became so pressing that she asked the nurse for something, anything, with words on. The nurse came back with Hello! magazine so Ruth spent the rest of the night reading about footballers' weddings and obscure Spanish royalty to the accompaniment of jagged grunts from the bed next door.

This week I am spotlighting The Janus Stone by Elly Griffiths. I recently discovered this series and am really enjoying it. Here is the description of the book from Amazon:

It’s been only a few months since archaeologist Ruth Galloway found herself entangled in a missing persons case, barely escaping with her life. But when construction workers demolishing a large old house in Norwich uncover the bones of a child beneath a doorway—minus its skull—Ruth is once again called upon to investigate. Is it a Roman-era ritual sacrifice, or is the killer closer at hand?

Ruth and Detective Harry Nelson would like to find out—and fast. When they realize the house was once a children’s home, they track down the Catholic priest who served as its operator. Father Hennessey reports 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 trail by frightening her, and her unborn child, half to death.