The Frozen People
Ali Dawson #1
By Elly Griffiths
ISBN 9780593834374
Author’s website: ellygriffiths.co.uk
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
Some murders can’t be solved in just one lifetime.
Ali Dawson and her cold case team investigate crimes so old, they’re frozen—or so their inside joke goes. Nobody knows that her team has a secret: they can travel back in time to look for evidence.
The latest assignment sees Ali venture back farther than they have dared before: to 1850s London to clear the name of Cain Templeton, an eccentric patron of the arts. Rumor has it that Cain is part of a sinister group called The Collectors. Ali arrives in the Victorian era to another dead woman at her feet and far too many unanswered questions.
As the clock counts down, Ali becomes more entangled in the mystery, yet danger lurks around every corner. She soon finds herself trapped, unable to make her way back to her beloved son, Finn, who is battling his own accusations in the present day.
Could the two cases be connected? In a race through and against time, Ali must find out before it’s too late.
Review
Ali Dawson is part of a special Criminal Investigation Department (CID), a small team that is investigating cold cases, which, as some might joke, are also the most frozen. Her team, the Department of Logistics, time-travels to gather evidence and close cases that have no new leads, and the criminal is still unknown.
While it is a strange and secret concept, Ali and her team have time-traveled a couple of times and have managed to close cases. The technology that allows them to time-travel is new, and the dangers are possible, but a new case has popped up, and it involves traveling even further into the past, and this time, Ali is going by on her own.
The Department of Logistics, also known as the “Frozen People”, consists of Geoff Bastian, the department’s director, Serafina “Jones” Pellegrini, the inventor of time-travel technology, and Buddhika “Bud” Sirisema, a brilliant Physicist who was a student of Jones. Dina is a Computer Forensics Investigator, and John and Ali, who are CID officers.
The Frozen People was an interesting read; the summary of the book is a great hook that pulls the reader. As it mentions, Ali gets stuck in the past, and the story centers around her team, finding a way to bring her back, and her looking into the murder case that had happened as she arrived.
While the narrative takes place in two different timelines, it still does a good job of keeping the reader guessing what is going to happen. In the past, we also met Cain Templeton, a wealthy philanthropist, who was accused of the murder of three women, but his descendant, the Justice Minister Isaac Templeton, believes he is innocent.
Given the rise of crime-solving and cold cases TV shows, the topic of time-traveling to solve cases was entertaining. In the book, it’s a bit complicated, and it is not all that well explained how they time-travel. Basically, Jones has found a way to bend the atoms of a specific space to open a gate that pulls a person back in time, later that same gate in the same space pulls them forward.
The Frozen People is the first book in the series of Ali Dawon by author Elly Griffiths. While some parts of the story get resolved, others are left unresolved, and new problems arise that will be solved in the following books. Most of all, the women’s murderer in 1850’s may be still free in the present day.
If you are a fan of crime novels and who did it genre, then I recommend the Frozen People. Time travel to solve cold cases might be the main root of this story, but like any other tale, it is not that easy.
