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Fiction. Mystery. Suspense. Thriller. HTML:When Eugenie Davies is killed by a driver on a quiet London street, her death is clearly no accident. Someone struck her with a car and then deliberately ran over her body before driving off, leaving nothing behind but questions. What brought Eugenie Davies to London on a rainy autumn night? Why was she carrying the name of the man who found her body? Who among the many acquaintances in her complicated and tragic life could have wanted her dead? And could her murder have some connection to a twenty-eight-year-old musical wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist who several months earlier suddenly and inexplicably lost the ability to play a single note? For Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, whose own domestic life is about to change radically, these questions are only the first in an investigation that leads him to walk a fine line between personal loyalty and professional honor. Assigned to the case by his superior, Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Lynley learns that Webberly's first murder investigation as a DI over twenty years ago involved Eugenie Davies and a sensational criminal trial. Yet what is truly damaging is what Webberly already knows and no doubt wants Lynley to keep concealed. Now the pressure is on Lynley to find Eugenie Davies' killer. For not only is he putting his own career into jeopardy, but he is also attempting to safeguard the careers of his longtime partners Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. Together, they must untangle the dark secrets and darker passions of a family whose history conceals the truth behind a horrific crime.… (more)
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A Traitor to Memory
Elizabeth George
2001
719 pages
½ /5 stars
What do you call a book with too many characters and of those characters only the two regulars in this series are enjoyable yet receive little print time while the rest are not likeable nor sincere nor whom the reader can
Would I recommend it…………..No, but I certainly would not write off Elizabeth George. She is a masterful writer but the length of this labyrinth should have been addressed in the editing room.
Familiar characters from George’s previous novels make an appearance, including the likable Detective Winston Nkata, the Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Lynley’s wife Helen, and Lynley’s close friend and forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James and his wife Deborah.
The erstwhile friends and family of Gideon Davies are given enough of a psychological vetting in Gideon’s diaries to show that this prodigy has spent his life surrounded by some very bizarre people, who in turn have made him very bizarre as well. He is still, at age 28, a spoiled boy who thinks everyone’s life should revolve around him. Contributing to this perception is his father Richard Davies, who will make any sacrifice for his son, even in preference to his young pregnant lover Jill Foster.
Like other George mysteries, we must look back to the epigraph to get her sense of the message of the book, which in this case is a quote from II Samuel: “O my son Absalom, My son, my son, Absalom! Would God I had died for thee.” The son in this case is of course Gideon, and the father, involved in his son’s life to a pathological degree, is Richard Davies.
If Gideon and Richard aren’t very likeable, neither are the others who have been with them over the years. His mother, Eugenie, deserted the family after Sonia died. His sister’s former nanny Katya has just been released from twenty years in prison for killing Sonia and now divides her time sneaking between two female lovers met in prison. His former house co-boarder is an internet sex addict who now goes by the handle TongueMan. And so it goes.
George engages us with the usual stockpile of family secrets and plot twists and turns, but the endless self-absorption of such a central character as Gideon was a bit wearing. Our old Scotland Yard friends from her previous mysteries had to play “second fiddle” in this story to the bratty violinist. The chronological dislocution only made it harder to bear.
(JAF)
What brought Eugenie Davies to London on a rainy autumn night? Why was
For Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, whose own domestic life is about to change radically, these questions are only the first in an investigation that leads him to walk a fine line between personal loyalty and professional honor.
Assigned to the case by his superior, Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Lynley learns that Webberly's first murder investigation as a DI over twenty years ago involved Eugenie Davies and a sensational criminal trial. Yet what is truly damaging is what Webberly already knows and no doubt wants Lynley to keep concealed.
Now the pressure is on Lynley to find Eugenie Davies' killer. For not only is he putting his own career into jeopardy, but he is also attempting to safeguard the careers of his longtime partners Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. Together, they must untangle the dark secrets and darker passions of a family whose history conceals the truth behind a horrific crime.
So yeah, it is very long, somewhat repetitive and there are a lot of characters to keep up with, but I liked it and there were some gems in there like this one - “We grind against each other, then, which is probably the way it happens when a man and a woman are trying to preserve a connection that’s already been severed. And in that grinding, we wear each other away until what we had is so distant a memory that we can no longer sift through the discord of our present to locate the harmony that defined our past. And it ends.”
Not my favourite George novel and I'll be skipping it if I reread.