This is not a good novel. I don't think you've heard me say this very often before, as I usually keep quiet about books I don't like. But don't mind making an exception for an author who is phenomenally, and in my view, undeservedly successful. Dan Brown is another such, and I've sounded off about him before, but in the past I used to quite enjoy Elizabeth George's novels so when this one came my way I thought it might be entertaining. But it was really not.
Very briefly, here we have Inspector Thomas Lynley (aka the Earl of somewhere or other) walking the cliff paths of Cornwall trying to recover from the devastation of his wife's murder. He stumbles upon a dead body and gets caught up in the subsequent murder enquiry.
One thing above all else annoys many British readers of EG's novels -- her tin ear. These are novels set in England but written by an American, and boy does it show. Oh, she does try, but it is strange that her English editors don't pick up on the many places where she fails. In this novel, for example, I was terribly irritated by her constant use of 'likely', as in 'he was likely down at the pub', which cropped up both in the narrative and in the mouths of characters such as the Eton and Oxford educated Lynley. But here, on top of her faux Englishness, she has superimposed a faux Cornishness. This results in every character having a bizarre name -- Selevan Penrule, Kerra, Benesek and Dellen Kerne, Daidre Trahair, Cadan Angharrack -- sorry, but no.
The thing is, I have forgiven EG before because despite all this I've found her plots absorbing. Here, though, I kept waiting for the novel to take off and it never did. There's a lot of pop psychology, sub-plot gets piled on sub-plot, and the characters are uniformly unattractive and often plain unconvincing. So honestly I didn't care a jot for any of them, not even Lynley who I just wished would pull himself together. I was tempted to just give up but ended up skimming the last quarter of the book only to find out who did it, which turned out to be a big anti-climax anyway.
Sorry, Elizabeth, but I don't think I'll bother in the future. And sorry anyone who loved it -- lucky we don't all like the same things.