Book Review: Digging Up History by Sheila Connolly

As the Museum Mysteries ends, it does so on a not so satisfying manner.

The story begins with Nell Pratt working on the budget for the Preservation Society (the Society) when summer intern, Dylan Robertson, interrupts her. He’s been working on a project which Harriet Fetherstone has left to the Society and he doesn’t know if it has any legs.

Stuck inside is a faded letter and later that night she tells her boyfriend James about it.

Since he’s an agent with the FBI, he invites them over to the office where one of the technicians is able to restore the ink. The restoration doesn’t really help them, but thanks to former board member, Martha Terwillinger, she’s able to decipher that its a map of early Philadelphia.

This brings up a childhood memory for Martha when she and her cousins were playing in that area when they thought they saw a dead body.

She gets in touch with Barney Taylor, a builder and he tells her that his current project is on hold because they’ve unearthed over 200 skeletons.

Nell, Dylan, Martha and James meet Barney at the site the next day and more skeletons are discovered and after getting some pictures under an old abandoned house, Dylan crawls under the foundation, snaps some pictures and confirms that there is a body.

But that’s not all, since there are other secrets hiding under the house.

I wasn’t expecting too much in this final installment because I can’t stand the narcisstic Nell. She’s someone that you would like to hit if you were to meet her in public and everything needs to revolve around her. I hate people like this.

Anyway, I wouldn’t exactly call this a mystery since all of the skeletons are centuries old and it’s just a story about a group of people trying to figure out what to do with the skeletons and how they had gotten there.

While I’m glad to be done with this series, sadly, Connolly passed away on April 20, 2020.