Ali Dawson

About the Ali Dawson series

Elly Griffiths's newest series gives her signature blend of procedural mystery and deep historical texture a genuinely new engine: time travel. Ali Dawson is a fifty-something detective with red hair and a nose ring who works for the fictional Department of Logistics, a secretive unit that has quietly been solving cold cases since 2020 by sending investigators physically back into the past. In The Frozen People (2025), Ali travels to 1850s London to clear the name of Cain Templeton, the eccentric Victorian ancestor of a sitting MP, and finds a case -- and a city -- far more dangerous than she expected. The Killing Time (2026) sends her back again, moving between contemporary London and its equivalent nearly two centuries earlier as a new cold case unravels across both timelines.

Where Ruth Galloway digs up the past and Ali Dawson literally walks into it, the underlying appeal is the same: Griffiths using history not as costume but as evidence, letting period detail -- Victorian London's streets, class structures and forensics-free policing -- do real investigative work. The premise adds a genre element entirely new to Griffiths's catalog without abandoning what her longtime readers come for: a sharp, funny, middle-aged woman investigator, a fair-play mystery, and a strong sense of place across two eras at once.