It's the Quick Book Reviews summer special, and Philippa is joined by the wonderful Elly Griffiths — bestselling author of the Ruth Galloway series — to talk holidays, her latest novel The Killing Time, and what's coming next in the world of time-travelling detective Ali Dawson.
☀️ Holiday Chat
Elly is a self-confessed good traveller — half Italian, born in August, and happiest in the heat. She and Philippa cover:
Dream holiday: a pale pink villa on the Amalfi Coast, a little boat, one evening a week with a local chef, and a carefully curated stack of books
Nightmare holiday: Las Vegas — fake light, fake skies, rows of slot machines, and a pool you're not actually allowed to swim in
The art of the airport — checkers vs loungers, and why Elly is slowly becoming her husband
Buying your own book in an airport duty-free shop and having to pretend you didn't know it was there
The Jodi Picoult book she left behind in a holiday rental with one chapter to go (it still haunts her)
The worst possible holiday book: saccharine sweet, no darkness underneath, and the last chapter ripped out
🎙️ The Killing Time — Elly Griffiths
The second book in the Ali Dawson series finds time travel strictly forbidden — until Ali's cat goes missing and she decides the rules don't quite apply to that. What follows takes her to 1851, the Great Exhibition, a sinister mesmerist called Barry Power, and a chance encounter with Italian physicist Serafina Pellegrini — all with her cat Terry somehow along for the ride.
Elly and Philippa discuss:
Why time travel in these books is really just "where Allie goes" — no sci-fi knowledge required
How Ali arrived fully-formed, red-haired and nose-ringed, walking down an East End street
Her nod to Chaucer's Wife of Bath in Allie's character
The Ruth Galloway update — a short story set on a Nile cruise, and a tantalising hint about Ruth's daughter Kate turning 18 this November...
The Case of the Christmas Card (out October): a novella in which Charles Dickens travels to 2024, falls in love with M&S sandwiches, and helps Ali solve a case
The Night Watchman (out February): Ali goes back to the London Blitz — and Elly goes deep on 1940s rabbit keeping
What expression she hopes readers will have at the end: satisfaction, with a little curl of curiosity
Ice cream order: Coffee, classic, in a little cup — the odd coffee bean acceptable, squirty cream absolutely not.
The Killing Time is out now in hardback. Paperback out 10th September.
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