Elly Griffiths is a well-known crime writer, most famous for her Ruth Galloway series, which features a forensic archaeologist as its protagonist. My introduction to Griffiths, however, was through her 2018 work The Stranger Diaries, a novel which—with its dextrous mingling of elements from dark academia, mystery, and gothic fiction—felt like nothing I had read before. I have followed Griffiths’s crime writing ever since, and when I learnt that she was writing a time-travel story, and that it was probably the first in a new series, I knew I was going to read it. In The Frozen People, Griffiths treads on a slightly new surface, making the book a speculative mystery, a story that attempts to marry two genres.
The Frozen People begins on January 9, 2023 (which is the present time in the world of the novel), as we meet fifty-year-old Alison, aka Ali, who works in the blandly titled Department of Logistics. Also nicknamed the frozen people, the department has been in existence for the past ten years. Ostensibly, the purpose of the department is to work on cold cases, and Ali’s work involves nothing dangerous—or at least this is what Ali has told her son Finn. What Ali and her colleagues actually do is travel backwards in time to solve crimes. This is a secret known only to a handful of people in the government and has been made possible by the research of Serafina Pelligrini, who likes to be known simply as Jones. The complications in the plot arise when Ali is asked by Isaac Templeton, a government minister who also happens to be Finn’s boss, to go back to the 1850s and investigate his great-great grandfather, Cain Templeton, who was believed to have murdered three women. There have also been rumours that he was part of an elite club which required initiates to kill a woman in order to be granted entry. While Ali has travelled back in time before, nobody has ever gone so far back.
On Jones’s assurance that she can safely send Ali to Victorian London and bring her back, and that Ali will have to stay there for no longer than an hour, Ali undertakes elaborate research and preparations for travel only to realise once she arrives in the nineteenth century that her egress point is no longer working. Stranded in an unfamiliar land and time, she tries her best to investigate as much as she can, as she waits for Jones to bring her back. In a parallel storyline, Isaac Templeton is murdered and Finn, Ali’s son, is the prime suspect. How Ali manages to crack the mystery of who might have murdered Isaac—at the same time as she suspects somebody from 1850 of having travelled to 2023, through what was supposed to be her own way home—is what makes up for the bulk of the novel.
Griffiths is adept at writing engaging mysteries and she doesn’t falter in the present book either. The story is well paced and well written, with enough intrigue and twists to maintain the reader’s interest in whether Finn’s name will be cleared or if the crime has really been committed by a time-travelling Victorian murderer. To add to this, there are further plot complications arising from hints of a suggested relationship between Cain and Ali in the long-ago past, alongside certain other elements that create patterns of complicated relationships between the past and the present. Griffiths also does a commendable job of recreating Victorian London, especially when seen from the perspective of women, through descriptions of Ali’s stay there. Be it the icy slush on the roads or the difficulty in emptying one’s chamber pot, the candle-lit empty evenings without mobile phones or the right way of a woman speaking and behaving with a man: all of this occupies the reader’s attention as much as its central and peripheral mysteries.
The reader never feels overwhelmed by these historical details, though. They are all knit into the storyline with a deftness that is a marker of Griffiths’s experience and the quality of her writing. Like many contemporary novels of the mystery/thriller genre—such as Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark (2020), C. J. Tudor’s The Chalk Man (2018), Ruth Ware’s The It Girl (2022), Simone St. James’s The Broken Girls (2018), Stacy Willingham’s All the Dangerous Things (2023), Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods (2024), and so on—The Frozen People also moves between the past and the present. However, while in some novels this choice can feel more a strategy to keep up with current trends than a necessity of the plot, in The Frozen People the shift in timelines is a need of the story. Further, the shift doesn’t happen with every alternate chapter, but only after the readers have spent some time in either location. This proves to be a welcome change from the breathless pace of most contemporary novels in the genre, and also feels more suitable to the Victorian milieu in which a considerable part of the book is set.
When it comes to explaining the science behind the time travel, Griffith makes the wise choice of not dwelling upon it more than strictly necessary. But this doesn’t mean that she glosses over it entirely, either. In a very clever strategy, she ensures that most discussions about the science behind the technology take place between two characters who have no background in higher-level physics, like Alison and Templeton. Even when Jones, the brain behind this technology, is a part of such discussions, she is always shown in conversation with a lay person and doesn’t need to discuss or describe the intricacies of the process. As a result, all that we learn about how travel in time is made possible is along the lines of what Alison tells Isaac at one point: “she [Jones] developed an actual way of moving atoms in space. I can’t explain it—no one can really—but it’s as if you create a space and then fill it with that exact person.” Or, as Jones tells Ali when asked about the difficulty of travelling so far back in time, “It’s just creating a loop”; Ali repeats what Jones has told her many times before: “We square the square and enter the fifth dimension.”
However, Griffiths ensures that even Jones isn’t infallible, that there is a lot that she doesn’t yet know. And because the focus of The Frozen People isn’t on the science of travelling backwards in time but rather on the complications of the plot that might have been born as a result of it, the strategy works. In this respect, The Frozen People reminded me of Kaliane Bradley’s The Ministry of Time (2024), in which the actual act of time travel becomes a catalyst for more pressing and urgent plot points.
The ending of The Frozen People is satisfying and self-contained enough to let it work perfectly as a standalone book. However, Griffiths also leaves certain threads dangling which, if not entirely unwoven, are at least somewhat loosely tied to the rest of the narrative—and hint at the possibility of another book in The Frozen People’s universe. This will be a sequel which, if and when it is written, has the potential to be related to its predecessor not just by virtue of Ali time-travelling to solve another crime—but by following even more closely those adventures and experiences of Alison in 1850, whose shadows continue to lurk in 2023, whether in the form of a letter discovered in a Victorian desk or a woman’s sketch that dates to the same period. As a voracious reader of the mystery/thriller genre, I was satisfied with The Frozen People in all its aspects. It offers an engaging mystery, a generous dose of Victorian London, and elements of time-travel all wrapped into a neat package. All in all, The Frozen People is a speculative mystery I’d recommend.