Englischsprachige Literatur

George Elizabeth

With no one as witness

Hodder and Stoughton, London 2005

Galbraith3

This Inspector Lynley mystery might not be George´s latest, it certainly is her most voluminous with 664 pages. And 500 of them are a good read, specially so as, for a change, it´s not young girls who mysteriously disappear in London but young boys, five of them, to be correct.

Lynley as well as Barbara Havers are faced with an uphill fight against assistant commissioner Hillier and their private problems, in addition to hunting down a mentally tortured killer out there in the dark, who, like P. Cornwell´s criminals, plays hide and seek and kill with them. But unfortunately George doesn´t trust her own plot and introduces two more crimes with the corresponding perpetrators, to give the story an extra touch.

So in the end, not only Lynley´s wife Helen and their not yet born baby have to die, but Lynley consequently resigns from his post. And the reader is left just as frustrated with the main characters as George obviously was. Maybe a trip to the Reichenbach Falls would have been more in line with literary tradition. George might also have realized, just as this reader here did, that the characters of Lynley and Havers in the TV series are a lot more interesting than their paper version.