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The Crossing Places
By Elly Griffiths
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $25
Someone has murdered a young girl, possibly two, in a wind-swept salt marsh on the southeastern English coast, and it’s up to forensic archaeologist and amateur sleuth Ruth Galloway to figure out “whodunit?” Was it a former hippie turned archaeologist, the warden of
a bird sanctuary, or a self-styled Druidic wizard? The investigation leads to an Iron Age woodhenge and reveals an eerie connection between the modern crime and the ancient past.
Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans
By Brian Fagan
Bloomsbury Press, $28
ARCHAEOLOGY contributing editor Brian Fagan provides readers with intimate accounts of what he imagines Ice Age life was like for both the vanishing Neanderthals and the invading Homo sapiens who developed the basis of modern culture. He lauds the “endless ingenuity and adaptability” of ordinary men and women living in bitterly cold Paleolithic Europe. “My DNA tells me that, genetically, I’m one of them,” Fagan concludes, “and I’m proud of it.”
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