Believing the Lie

November 28, 2011
Lord Bernard Fairclough, a wealthy industrialist, asks Det. Insp. Thomas Lynley to secretly delve into the accidental death of his gay nephew, Ian Cresswell, in bestseller George’s less than satisfying 17th novel featuring the Scotland Yard policeman (after 2010’s This Body of Death). Det. Sgt. Barbara Havers and other series regulars help Lynley try to unspool a tangled web of drug addiction and recovery, gay marriage, extramarital affairs, egg donation, and online sexual predators. As usual in George’s work, the process of detection reveals more about those doing the detecting than the mystery itself. Some of the subplots—such as Havers’s attempts to spruce up her appearance—lead to dead ends. Zed Benjamin, a bumbling rookie journalist, offers some farcical moments to lighten up the general gloom. Statements of the obvious (“Deborah hated being at odds with her husband”) and platitudes for unbearably painful situations will annoy some, while others will see the denouement from a mile off. Agent: Robert Gottlieb at Trident Media Group.

December 15, 2011
Why investigate an accidental drowning? Wealth hath its privileges, and one of them, Lord Fairclough finds, is bending New Scotland Yard to his will by arranging for a discreet inquiry into the accidental drowning of his nephew Ian Cresswell. So Inspector Thomas Lynley (The Body of Death, 2010, etc.) is dispatched incognito to the Lake District, where his task is to determine whether Fairclough's wastrel son Nicholas perhaps jimmied loose the boathouse stones on which Ian slipped to his death. The coroner thinks not, but Lynley has asked forensic specialist Simon St. James and his photographer wife Deborah to nose around just in case there's evidence of foul play to be found. Meanwhile, back in London, DS Havers is engaged in another sort of research on the morosely dysfunctional Faircloughs, which includes Fairclough's warring twin daughters Manette and Mignon; his nephew Ian's corrosively angry son Tim and sexually rapacious ex-wife Niamh; as well as the man Ian left his family for, the foreign-born Kaveh; and, of course, there's Fairclough's recovering junkie/alcoholic son Nicholas and his beautiful, secretive Argentine wife Alatea. Muddying the landscape is a tabloid reporter who's eager to save his job with a juicy sex scandal, even if he has to make one up. Pedophilia, homophilia, infidelity, illegitimacy and greed will come into play, but it is Deborah, consumed with her own infertility, who sets in motion the final tragedy. Pared-down George, weighing in at a svelte 600 pages, but still strewn with subplots, melodrama, melancholy, a wretchedly unhappy Havers and the impossibly heroic, impossibly nice Thomas Lynley.

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Starred review from November 1, 2011
In the seventeenth Inspector Lynley mystery, Bernard Fairclough, who catapulted himself from sketchy origins and a line of improved lavatories to enormous wealth and a title, uses his pull to get Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley of New Scotland Yard on a death investigation involving Fairclough's nephew. The nephew, a grown man, has drowned after slipping from a scull on Lake Windermere in Cumbria, within sight of his uncle's stately home. While the death has been officially ruled accidental, Fairclough is convinced that his nephew met with foul play. And the standout suspect is Fairclough's son, Nick, very shakily rehabilitated from a lifetime of addiction. As Lynley and his friends, Simon and Deborah St. James, take on the family from different perspectives, they learn that prodigal Nick is just the most obvious one in a Medusa's tangle of family snakes. George moves Lynley from London to Cumbria for a good, old-fashioned country home mystery. Lynley himself only gets more fascinating, as each novel adds more layers to his characterization. The plot gets mired at times, though, in George's overexpansive expositionshe can take most of a page to lay out a character's musings over whether to don a winter or a summer suit. Tension would be greater with less verbiage, but this is still great George. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Although an American, George stands shoulder to shoulder with P. D. James and Ruth Rendell as a grande dame of the British mystery. The ongoing success of the Lynley mysteries on PBS continues to bring in new fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)