A review by ceallaighsbooks
The Crossing Places by Elly Griffiths

dark fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

1.0

TITLE—The Crossing Places
AUTHOR—Elly Griffiths
PUBLISHED—2009
PUBLISHER—Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

GENRE—mystery crime thriller
SETTING—Norfolk, England
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—archaeology, New Age stuff, ancient henge sites, ley lines, birding, salt marsh, boundaries & liminal places, human sacrifice & ritual burials, bog bodies, horrible human relationship dynamics, cats, university jobs, child abduction & murder, modern English society & culture (though a bit dated even for 2009 imo…)

WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERS—⭐️⭐️
STORY/PLOT—⭐️
PHILOSOPHY—🚩🚩🚩

My thoughts:
Oh gods this book was a mess. Though I’m not too familiar with the genre (crime/mystery/thriller), I thought the plot seemed way too cliché and predictable (I’m terrible at guessing whodunnits and this one I guessed *immediately*), the characters’ actions made zero sense to the point that it was disorienting, and the underlying philosophy was awful.

—👇🏻HERE BE SPOILERS👇🏻—
This book presented New Agers as mad kooks, and born again Christians as fanatical (but at least nOt As BaD as New Agers 😬). The (“fat”, single-with-two-cats, living-in-an-isolated-cottage) MC—who referred to her body at one point as “a waste” because she had never had children—was “redeemed” at the end by becoming pregnant by the married man she slept with halfway through the book. 🥴 Her odd obsession with her toxic, abusive, cheating mentor was extremely lazily justified at the end because pEoPlE aRe CoMpLiCaTeD and nO bOdY iS pErFeCt even though the dude literally died while chasing her out into the marsh during a storm and the MC was convinced he was the killer at one point. One of the characters got back together with his wife even though he was neither happy nor in love with her and it was *uncritically* presented as the right thing to do. And the person who ended up being the killer was neurodivergent and basically presented as having done what he did due to mental instability. Yeah. This book was a WHOLE mess.

I read this book as part of #ArchaeoBookclub and the archaeology in the book was, though somewhat accurately depicted (i.e. the author clearly did her research), disappointingly applied fixating on death rituals (which is an over-sensationalized part of archaeological scholarship) and, even worse, human sacrifice (a highly controversial and debatable interpretation of some ancient burials). It just came off as very lazy and many times the things the author did get wrong (how artifacts were often incorrectly excavated & recorded, the fact that the use of honeysuckle rope in one of the modern burials wasn’t an immediate indicator of who the killer was, and the archaeologist musing about the monetary value of one of the artifacts as her first thought upon uncovering it) too often took me out of the story.
—🛑END OF SPOILERS🛑—

I would not recommend this book.

Final note: Still glad I read it though (and that I was able to get it from the library) just so I know what’s out there. 👀 And I also want to emphasize that I firmly believe that just because a book is a piece of “genre fiction” or is meant as “just” escapism and entertainment, that doesn’t mean that it’s ok to uncritically feature highly problematic ideas and beliefs.

⭐️

(This proves at least that I don’t only give books four and five star ratings. 😆 Fwiw I will only really post one or two star reviews if I feel like the book was problematic on some level and needs to be addressed.)

Season: Winter

CW // fatphobia, animal death (cat), child abduction & murder, infidelity, misogyny, toxic relationships, ableism (Please feel free to DM me for more specifics!)

Further Reading—
  • LAST RITUALS by Yrsa Sigurðardóttir—this was another book from this genre that I read because of its connections to archaeology and certain historical subjects that I’m interested in and that was similarly disappointing in its handling of those topics, though maybe not as much as Griffiths’ book.
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