Rating: 
Summary: Next please....
Review: I am a major fan of the Linley/Havers series, but "Traitor to Memory" was a big disappointment. Tommy & Barbara were peripheral characters, and a 'major' plot twist was very obvious to me early on in the novel. Said plot twist was concelaed with cliche devices such as character psychosis and dream analysis. The novel was tedious and at times confusing due to the dual narration.
Also, this EG novel was badly in need of some more editing, it could have been reduced by at least 100 pages. Although it has to be said, even a bad EG Linley/Havers experience is still one worth reading. I am addicted to these novels. So, next one please....
Rating: 
Summary: Violin Violence
Review: Weighing in at 1006 pages, this tale describes a young violinist prodigy's struggle to find out with a psychiatrist, why he is blocked from playing. Sgt. Haver and Insp. Lynley play relatively minor roles. Some of straight-arrow Lynley's miscues are inexplicable. A Californian's speech is perfectly mimicked. The narration alternates among the violinist, his family and the cops in inspiral fashion, giving the reader the feeling he's learning of each event for the third time and muddying the chronology. While the plot as a whole is credible, the ending is not.
Rating:
Summary: Great Story, Disappointing Resolution
Review: I read this book on a trip to the Far East, and at times couldn't wait to get back to the hotel to see what was going to happen next! E. George introduces character after character, plot twist after plot twist, and it was all fascinating. When I was getting near the end of the book I started to worry--how is she possibly going to resolve all the issues she's created? And, that ended up being the major problem with the book: unclear, slapdash resolutions of highly complex characters and situations. I felt the same thing happened in "For the Sake of Elena." But this time it was far worse. One of the most interesting, put-upon and tragic characters (Katja)is left hanging. I'm beginning another George book, but am almost afraid to start really caring about the characters.
Rating: 
Summary: Expect the Unexpected
Review: If you're a huge EG fan, as I am, this book will not be what you've come to expect from her series. It took me a few weeks to blast through her entire series -- I was hooked at Book One. So, this new one was eagerly awaited, but sadly it disappointed. It's hugely confusing, and really didn't present any sympathetic characters. The lack of detail about Havers and Lynley left this book feeling flat. I think Peach (the St. James' dog) had more exposure than St. James.
Rating:
Summary: Elizabeth George for Ruth Rendell fans
Review: Summary: A woman is killed by a hit-and-run driver, but it doesn't take the police long to discover that she was deliberately murdered. Lynley, Havers, and Nkata are called in on the case, primarily because Lynley can be relied upon to discreet. We soon discover why the discretion is necessary, since the victim is a woman with whom Lynley's immediate supervisor had an affair years ago. The victim is also the mother of a murdered Down's syndrome baby who had been killed twenty years before. The investigation, and the plot of the book, quickly focus on those events from twenty years before. The murdered baby had a brother who was a violin prodigy, and who has now (at the age of 28) suddenly lost his ability to play. About a third of the book is told through his eyes, as he tried to uncover his memories with the help of a psychiatrist. As with all Elizabeth George novels, this one is richly populated with thought-provoking events and characters. The mystery is complex and fascinating. The writing is superb. But this time there is more of a pervasive sense of gloom, with characters that are almost all unhappy or emotionally disturbed in some way. There is, to me, a strong echo of Ruth Rendell in this book, although Elizabeth George is a much better writer than Rendell. If you LIKE the Rendell approach to mysteries (which I don't), then you will probably like this one better than any of the previous ten Lynley/Havers novels. But I am one of those superficial people who like happy endings and happy characters, even if I realize that in reality, murders don't produce much happiness. So, I didn't finish this novel with the same sense of deep satisfaction that I feel at the end of most other Elizabeth George books.
Rating:
Summary: Botched the genetics again...300 pages too long
Review: I have read a number of Elizabeth George books and I liked this one the least. It is slow-moving, confusing and at some points, just plain dull. My biggest complaint, however, is with her research. There are several medical and genetics mistakes in this work (as there are in her some of her other works) that make me wonder about her research methods.
- An "imperforate ..." at eight months?! WRONG (Did no one notice that the child hadn't dirtied her diaper (or nappy) in eight months?) - A balanced translocation of ONE chromosome? WRONG. - A balanced translocation leading to NO livebirths. WRONG. If she can get these wrong, what else is in error? While these are all minor storypoints, I believe that they cast doubt on all facts in the novel. Ms. George seems to like to incorporate medical/genetics knowledge into her books but should get appropriate professional input. While these are minor points, they made a boring book insufferable. Her editor needs to start double check her facts and chopping boring storylines. If this book had been three hundred pages shorter, it might have been endurable.
Rating:
Summary: Contrived to Confuse
Review: Elizabeth George lets her own agenda get in the way of telling an intriguing tale with this effort. Too many subplots to advance the backstories of each of her stock characters, and too much manipulation of the reader by jumping back and forth in time so that significant clues are not revealed too early, result in a book not up to her previous standards. Moreover, her depiction of English cultural idiosyncracies is beginning to be formulaic rather than charming.
Rating: 
Summary: Less focus on Det.s Lynley &Havers..Still a 5***** Star Read
Review: ~ - ~
~ ~First, naturally, the lowdown for addicts of the Inspector Lynley/Sergeant Havers series: If you are a fan of Sergeant Barbara Havers, like I, you may be disappointed. She has a very small role in this story. However, we do come to know Inspector Lynley's other assistant, Winston Nkata, who does have an interesting and difficult role in the story. Tommy Lynley also, is facing some changes in his personal life. This story focuses less on the detectives than many of the others in the series. Most of the story is seen through the eyes of a member of the family close to the crime. A young violinist, who has had a career as a prodigy, is suddenly unable to play. He is searching his soul and his memory for reasons for this block. He unearths much more than he expected, the history of a death in his family when he was just a child. Does he remember anything about it? Or are the faint memories that begin, and he clings to, as much fabrication as the stories he's been told? This becomes critical has murder strikes his family again, now in the present. ~ ~ This George mystery is much more focused on an individual close to the crime than the others in the series. In this respect, it is more like "Playing for the Ashes" than more recent novels.
While less focus on the detectives was a little disappointing to me as a Havers fan, this was still a fascinating story. As always, her strength is in showing the complexity of the best and worst of human motives. She fills her stories with people we would love to hate, if they weren't so uncomfortably human, and full of some of the same faults we could find in ourselves. All in all, an absorbing read. 5 stars *****!
Rating:
Summary: too much navel-gazing
Review: Why is it that the more successful authors become the longer they feel their works need to be?
I'm a shrink, and I found absolutely nothing mysterious here, at all, and tremendous amounts of pedestrian psychobabble and dream analysis.
Let me say that I have really enjoyed George's previous works. Having said that, this work and _Playing for the Ashes_ share a flaw that worked better in the latter book than the former: first-person narration. This device worked well as a novelty in the latter book. It no longer works -- or doesn't work as well -- for this book which is not only slow but too long and suffers from a lack of prudent editing. (Where, oh where, was the editor here?) George's series has been built upon examining the lives of her detectives in the context of the cases they're handed (though I've found some of the melodramatics heavy-handed -- Deborah's moaning about not being able to have children in other books, as one example). But lately, George seems much more interested in the psychologies of her perpetrators (and the ancillary players) than in the detectives per se, which is fine if done well. It's not fine if not done well, and George didn't do it well here. Gideon's problems were simply silly and did nothing to advance the plot; they were merely an excuse to have a plot. Further, there was nothing here for Lynley and Havers to do, and they were characters in need of a plot -- some rationale for being put in this predicament to begin with. George could have put in Holmes and Watson, or Nixon and Agnew -- the results would have been the same. Things just happened; the detectives were props; and I figured out what was happening and whodunit well before the principals did. The plot was predictable, boring, and unnecessarily convoluted.
As a practicing psychiatrist and one who's been trained in psychoanalysis, I would also tell Ms. George that no psychiatrist in his or her right mind would have undertaken the "treatment" offered to Gideon in this day and age. Medications *can* work wonders and what passed for analysis in Ms. George's hands had me laughing out loud. And the business about Deborah's translocation being a barrier to her having a successful pregnancy is also poppycock. My husband is a geneticist and has worked with infertility for years. The end result is that translocations are not invariable and can be picked up when the embryo is in the 8-cell stage -- this is a field called pre-implantation genetics. So, Deborah can have her child if Ms. George decides to do her homework. Honestly, if Ms. George is going to venture into medicine, be it what passes for psychoanalysis or genetics, she needs to get her facts straight. All in all, a disappointment from an author who can do better.
Rating:
Summary: Confusing!!!
Review: I am a an avid reader of George and her series but this time around I was completely confused!! The mistakes in the time line in which the book takes place was unnecesarily too complicated and lost me towards the end, leaving me wondering whether things had actually happened in the sequence in which I had previously thought. One can see that George was going for complicated and simply landed on confusing...
and yes, the book was too LONG. So long that it became a trail to get through and the pay off at the end was not at all as santisfying as we would come to expect from George.
In a nutshell, this book was not one of George's best, in fact, more like her worst so far in an otherwise well writen and well thought out British mystery series.
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