Believing the Lie [Hardcover]

"He has set me in dark places
Like the dead of long ago." -- Lamentations 3:6 (NKJV)

Nothing pleases me more than to sit down with a long engrossing tale and to be drawn fully into a different world, gaining many insights from the experience . . . and feeling transformed at the end.

Having been a fan of the Thomas Lynley novels for some time, I settled in with this book and waited for the magic to arrive.

It was a long wait. In the last hundred pages, the book began to take on a more interesting character . . . or I would have rated it at one star.

This book needs a strong editor to whack it down to size to fit the story's potential. Without that, you'll spend a lot of time following matters that won't interest you very much and may even make you feel not as good as when you picked up the book.

Unless you feel compelled to read every word that Elizabeth George writes, I suggest you skip this book. The next one has to be better.

So what's it all about? The book's core concerns the death of Ian Cresswell, who had recently left his wife to live with his male lover. Sir David Hillier "loans" Lynley to a casual acquaintance, Bernard Fairclough, to look into the death in an unofficial way. Thomas asks Simon and Deborah St. James to join him in the sleuthing, and he makes occasional calls on Barbara Havers for research help. It's all a bit awkward because Thomas cannot tell his "guv" and lover, Isabelle Ardley, where he is or what he is doing . . . and Barbara Havers is under her authority.

The book has multiple narrators: the deceased; Lynley; Deborah; Barbara; Cresswell's son Tim; a Fairclough daughter; a Fairclough daughter-in-law; and Zed Benjamin, a tabloid reporter. This design allows for lots of subplots such as strains in Lynley's relationship with Isabelle, the St. Jameses dealing with infertility, the difficulties faced by the Cresswell children, trying to find a juicy story for a tabloid and still live with one's conscience, Barbara's battles against orders to improve her appearance, and Barbara's relationship with her neighbors.

The story has enough plots and subplots to fill six soap operas, so don't be surprised by anything that comes along. If it hasn't happened yet, it probably will.

Overall, the book left me feeling down . . . even though I admired the way that Ms. George ultimately pulled a couple of rabbits out of the hat to make the story more worth the slog.

I felt that only the writing about Barbara Havers was really good. If this book had been expanded to just focus on her, it would have been a far, far better work. Much of the rest involved too little character development, too many unlikely circumstances, too predictable development events, and not much encouragement to draw from the human pain displayed.

"Believing the Lie" is the 17th book in Elizabeth George's long-running Inspector Lynley series, and it continues to focus on Tommy Lynley, Earl of Asherton and Detective Inspector at Scotland Yard. One of his superiors asks him to undertake a clandestine investigation into the drowning death of a man living in Cumbria, in England's Lake District, after the man's uncle worries that something underhanded might have occurred in spite of the coroner ruling the death an accident. Tommy doesn't want to take on this task, but he has no choice, and he therefore enlists his friend Simon, a forensic specialist, and Simon's wife Deborah to join him on the trip, while also asking Barbara Havers, his partner at work, to look into some information from London. In the meantime, a young reporter for a scandal sheet has been sent to the same location in order to dig up dirt on the prodigal son and cousin of the dead man, and he is told not to return without a front-page story.... One of the most marvelous things about Elizabeth George's books is that she always takes the time to create and flesh out all of her characters, the individuals involved in the crime being investigated as much as the detective and his cohorts. This makes for lengthy novels (this one is just over 600 pages), but the characters and their complexities are so compelling that it's a joy to commit to the time required to find out all about them. It's possible that one could read any of this series without having read the previous ones, but one would be missing out on the depth and nuances of the main characters' changing relationships to each other and that would be a shame. Very highly recommended.

This book is a mess. There are tangled plot lines (and believe me in 600 pages things can get very tangled, unsatisfying characters and the need for a good editor. I have read all of George's books and have wavered over the past couple - this has totally turned me off. I simply won't bother when the next one comes out. Worst of all - that WHINEY Deborah St. James is back still moaning about having no kid around. I wanted to scream at her to go to China for a baby and hopefully stay there. She has pretty well destroyed Barbara Havers (who if George had any guts would make her gay) - the obsession with the neighbours is really getting stale.

So George has finally beaten me. One less fan. From reviews I have read on amazon and other sites, I am not alone. I wish I had waited for the paperback. It's very heavy in hardcover - making it difficult to toss out the window.