A Traitor to Memory

Rating:
Summary: Annoyed
Review: I was a fan of early Elizabeth George books, but stopped reading them years ago when Ms. George decided to spend more time developing whiny secondary characters than solving mysteries. After a few books where she tortured her readers with chapter after chapter of Deborah and her inability to get pregnant, I began skipping St. James/Deborah chapters. Then I realized that I was skipping huge sections of the book and it didn't matter. Why bother reading a mystery novel if you can skip the bulk of the book and not miss a step in the main character's investigation of a mystery?

This last weekend I spent a night at the bedside of an ill loved one, and was given A Traitor to Memory by a relative to help pass the time. The only good thing I can say about this terrible, terrible book is that it was long enough to last the night. George told too many stories that weren't central to the plot, the timeline was confusing, every character was annoying, their conversations were insipid and bore no resemblance to reality, and the solution to the mystery was neither surprising or ingenious. I knew how it would end by the time I'd gotten through the first couple of chapters.

Has Ms. George never been in a relationship? Don't people in her life ever say what they mean or ask for what they want? Does everyone in her life whine and complain incessantly? Does she think her characters resemble any people who walk planet earth? Does she not have an editor?

Ms. George would benefit from reacquainting herself with classic British mystery authors like Sayers, Christie, and Tey. These authors kept it simple: it's the mystery, stupid. If their detectives had home lives, the authors made sure they had interesting lives. Their detectives' friends were quirky and compelling and helped move the story along in some capacity. They didn't burden their detectives with lives that haunted them from book to book and annoyed readers beyond the capacity to care whether any of them lived or died.





Rating:
Summary: A Really Good Bad Mystery
Review: This is actually the first Elizabeth George mystery I have read, so I am relieved to read so many other reviews telling me this is one of her weakest works. The ending to this one was quite disappointing. Until I got there, however, the story was doing a fine job of holding my attention and interesting me in its many well-drawn characters.

It was because those characters were so well-drawn that I was so angered by the last few pages of this book. I felt that one character does something very startlingly stupid near the end. It was not at all in keeping with any of her previous behavior and it resulted in a stunningly grim ending to the story. That ending seemed like it had been tacked on because some marketing department determined that shocking and bleak equals highbrow and arty. Sometimes shocking and bleak just comes across as forced and irritating.

Rating:
Summary: What a disappointment!
Review: I have been an Elizabeth George fan for a long time, and I've come to expect certain things from her. This book did not deliver on most of them.

My biggest gripe is the ending. Don't worry, I'm not going to give it away here; but I would be remiss if I didn't describe my reaction of frustration and annoyance. I almost didn't make it to the end, and after the concerted effort that was required to do so, I felt extremely cheated.

This book is much too long, and there are way, WAY too many side characters and subplots. The narrative labors along like an overloaded freight train, weighted down as it is with all the excess baggage the author has piled on it. Its glacial pace is slowed even more by the frequent interjection of first person segments narrated by a character called Gideon, who is possibly the most singularly annoying individual I've ever encountered between the covers of a book.

Lynley and Havers pop in here and there, but their parts in this drama don't amount to much more than cameo appearances, in my opinion. Winston Nkata plays a larger role than either of them, and fond as I have come to be of him, this did not begin to make up for seeing so little of Tommy and Barbara. Ms. George needs to realize that we Lynley/Havers fans pick up one of her books out of a desire to read about Lynley and Havers, not an assortment of uninteresting and most unsavory secondary characters.

In my opinion, any Lynley fan dedicated enough to put up with such hardships to stay with this book all the way to the end is entitled to a payoff in the form of a satisfying conclusion. But sadly, the ending George provided only added to my frustration. My reaction could be summed up as follows: "THIS is what I suffered through all that for?"

I can't recommend this book to anyone except diehard Lynley fans like myself, who want to follow the whole series. If you do choose to read it, don't say I didn't warn you!

Rating:
Summary: What happened to you, Ms George?
Review: I say it up front - I didn't manage to finish this book. I fought my way through page 424 but by then was so incredibly bored and annoyed that I just couldn't go on any further. This is a big leap from times when I basically devoured each Elizabeth-George-novel. The main problems of the book are these:
- Way too much room is given to all kinds of side characters. If they were at least interesting, I could live with it, but their stories are so long-winded and boring. A large part of the book is devoted to the rantings of Gideon (not really a side character, though), in the form of a written report to his psychiatrist. I hated this technique when George used it in "Playing for the Ashes" with Olivia's diary and I hated it even more here. After Gideon needs 10 pages to describe the fact that he started up violin lessons, I skipped the Gideon parts.
- There are too many side characters. Constantly new character appear, each one with a full background story, much room dedicated to his/her thoughts, no matter how uninteresting and unimportant they are. All these new people make the read really confusing.
- Hardly any Lynley and Havers. I personally buy the Lynley/Havers series books because I want to read about Lynley and Havers solving a case. Here, they make a few appearances, far too little to support a Lynley/Havers book. Even worse, the scenes with them are uncharacteristically boring. On some pages I was wondering whether it was really Elizabeth George who wrote this book. What ever happened to Havers' being feisty? And since when is she on friendly-teasing terms with Helen? This made no sense at all and was just not the Havers I "know". The development between Lynley and Helen was not welcome to me at all and didn't fit with their characters either.
- The murder case and investigation were tedious and not gripping. The early Elizabeth George books, which had just a fraction of the volume of her later books, were absolute page turners. Everything was interesting, one was dying to know who the killer was and one was gripped by every minute of the investigation. Later books became more tedious and paid too much attention to the family history of victims, suspects and about everybody else (Missing Joseph and Playing for the Ashes were worst, In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner was marginally better). This book dives so deeply into family history that I just didn't care anymore who the murder was. There was just so much stuff around the story and so many long-winded scenes that reading was no fun.
I wish Elizabeth George would get back to her earlier crisp and thrilling style of writing. I know writers develop and have to develop, but her books just seem to get longer, more side-tracked and far away from the points that made reading the Lynley/Havers series so much fun. A real pity and a great disappointment.

Rating:
Summary: Not her best, but still pretty engrossing
Review: I've just finished reading the book and my first reaction is that of disappointment. The book builds up nicely to a climax which just doesn't deliver. There are too many loose ends and while I normally like authors who don't feel the need to give their books a sense of closure, this book ended just a bit too abruptly for me.

The book centres around the death of Sonia Davies, a child with Downs Syndrome born to Richard Davies and his wife Eugenie whose other child Gideon is a spoilt but talented musical prodigy. The book begins with a hit and run accident, and it is only much later that you see how this ties up to the main story (although it is never quite clear why Katie is killed). Anyway, the main plot revolves around Gideon, who's suddenly lost his ability to play music and goes to a psychiatrist, Dr Rose. So one half of the book involves his journal entries as he tries to recollect his past. That past was a troubled one, and involved the death of Sonia and the imprisonment of one Katja Wolff, an East German asylum seeker for twenty years, who mysteriously refused to defend herself at her trial. There are plots and sub plots, which I won't give away, but this is the story in very brief.

George is entertaining as ever in setting out her characters- the maniacal egoistical grandfather, the troubled mother Eugenie, the psychotic self centred musical genius, the father whose love for his son conquers all, the cold German nanny whom no one can quite figure out and so on. Sadly, there's little in the book about Lynley and Havers, which is a pity.

All in all, its an engrossing read most of the way through, except perhaps some of Gideon's long winded entries. Some of the characters never quite make sense- Sarah Jane, Raphael and so on. The end will leave you quite a bit disappointed, and so I didn't want to award it a 4.

Rating:
Summary: Least favorite of the series
Review: This is a wonderful series with fascinating characters: Lynley, his wife, Havers, St. James & Deborah but I had a really hard time getting through this book. I must say that the main reason this entry did not appeal to me is the device George uses of one of the "guest character's" (Gideon) diary. I found it, well, boring, to read his diary. Maybe I just did not like his persona or maybe I found it confusing that the diary & the regular chapters were not written simultaneously - I was confused sometimes because he would be writing about things that had not happened yet or had happened earlier in the book.
I was also disappointed in the fact that some loose ends from earlier books were not mentioned in this one - particularly Haver's potential boyfriend neighbor or her mother.
There was a new character introduced that I hope to see in future books - a potential love interest for Nkata.
Will still pick up the next book to read but won't have as much enthusiasm as I usually do.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing Addition to a Great Series
Review: A hit-and-run driver kills Eugenie Davies on a rainy night in London. Superintendent Webberly has a special interest in the victim and assigns Detective Lynley and Constable Havers to the case. Their investigation of Eugenie's trauma filled past turns up a wealth of suspects. Meanwhile, Gideon, violin genius extraordinaire, is struggling to overcome his sudden inability to play by revisiting his childhood memories with a therapist. Gideon's story and the murder investigation are woven together into an explosive collision course.

I'm a fan of George's Lynley/Havers mysteries, so it pains me to say that this one really needed some editing. At over 1000 rambling pages, it's a long slog to get to an uncharacteristically disjointed ending. George does paint a fascinating portrait of a severely dysfunctional family, but that doesn't make up for unexplained motivations and weak plot elements. One of George's strengths has been getting readers involved in the personal lives of her detectives as well as getting drawn into the mystery at hand. Unfortunately, Lynley, Havers, and the rest of the usual inhabitants feel more like supporting characters in A Traitor to Memory.

Ultimately, I found this book hard to get into and difficult to finish. If you're new to Elizabeth George, you might want to start with A Great Deliverance or Payment in Blood.

Rating:
Summary: Good, challenging book.
Review: This is the first book I've read by Elizabeth George. I'm impressed by her ability to write from so many points of view in such an effortless manner. The book is great, very atmospheric, and written with a quiet sense of urgency. The characters are so refreshingly flawed, without being contrived, which seems to me to be more and more of a rareity. I haven't enjoyed a book so much in years.