This is apparently number twenty in George’s Inspector Lynley series. I hadn’t read any the previous nineteen but it doesn’t matter much. Lynley sounds like a dish; his offsider Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers is his polar opposite in appearance and confidence and class but by golly she’s a good copper and Lynley appreciates her, even if very few others do.
The mystery here surrounds the apparent suicide of a well connected church deacon accused of paedopihilia. The police investigation of an earlier police investigation moves at a glacial pace -no doubt that’s quite realistic- with lots of threads being very, very slowly connected. George gives each character their due: building a picture of who they are, where they live, their history, their relationships with one another and, quite frequently, what they have for breakfast. The overall effect is quite hypnotic, though you may occasionally wish she’d move it along a bit. The payoff is that you do come away with a fully fledged understanding of the crime/s and the motivations of those involved. The last few chapters are quite suspenseful. The rest doesn’t quite qualify as thrilling but it rarely fails to be interesting. She’s good at people, is Elizabeth George.
