When a child's bones are found on a desolate beach nearby, Detective Chief Inspector Harry Nelson calls Ruth Galloway for help. Nelson thinks he has found the remains of Lucy Downey, a little girl who went missing ten years ago. Since her disappearance he has been receiving bizarre letters about her, letters with references to ritual and sacrifice.

Ruth Galloway is called in to investigate when builders, demolishing a large old house in Norwich to make way for a housing development, uncover the bones of a child beneath a doorway -- minus the skull. Is it some ritual sacrifice or just plain straightforward murder? DCI Harry Nelson would like to find out -- and fast. It turns out the house was once a children's home. Nelson traces the Catholic priest who used to run the home. Father Hennessey...

After an old university friend and fellow archaeologist's murdered, forensic archaeologist Ruth Galloway travels to Lancashire to examine the bones he found, which reveal a shocking fact about King Arthur, and discovers a campus living in fear of a sinister right-wing group called the White Hand.

"The macabre discovery of a downed WWII plane with the pilot's skeleton still inside leads Ruth and DCI Nelson to uncover a wealthy family's secrets in the seventh Ruth Galloway mystery" --

"Norwich is riddled with old chalk-mining tunnels, but no one's sure exactly how many. When Ruth is called in to investigate a set of human remains found in one of them, she notices the bones are almost translucent, a sign they were boiled soon after death. Once more, she finds herself at the helm of a murder investigation. Meanwhile, DCI Nelson is hunting for a missing homeless woman, Barbara, who he hears has gone "underground." Could she have disappeared...

When a man claiming to be Ruth's believed-dead former mentor sends threatening letters to Ruth Galloway and DCI Nelson, they investigate.

"There's nothing Ruth Galloway hates more than amateur archaeologists, but when a group of them stumble upon Bronze Age artifacts alongside a dead body, she finds herself thrust into their midst-and into the crosshairs of a string of murders circling ever closer"--

When the body of an archeology student, who went missing in 2002, is found during the renovation of a café, Dr. Ruth Galloway and DCI Nelson uncover a tangled web of relationships between the archeology group and the café. When builders discover a human skeleton while renovating a café, they call in archaeologist Dr. Ruth Galloway, who is preoccupied with the threatened closure of her department and by her ever-complicated relationship with DCI...