Oh, Elizabeth George!
Thu., May 12, 04:12 PM
I’ve written before about Elizabeth George and how I enjoy her novels, particularly the ones featuring Inspector Thomas Lynley. When you read a series like this, the development of the characters is almost more important than the mystery.
So it was with great anticipation that I bought With No One As Witness. I knew I would have difficulty if the type was small, and maybe it would take me a long time to read it. Nevertheless, I looked forward to it. Shortly after I started it, I read a review that said, “Elizabeth George has done a bad thing.”
Well, that certainly wasn’t going to stop me. How bad could it be? After all, I remembered reading the Luis Mendoza mysteries by Dell Shannon – back in the seventies – and even the death of a major character – shocking as it was – didn’t hurt the series as a whole.
I brought the book with me – along with a magnifying glass – while I waited for U.D. to come out of surgery. With no one to disturb me, I actually read about a hundred pages on my first attempt. Ah, yes, this was the ambience I liked so much, but I felt a strange foreboding. It seemed as if everyone was in danger. Not from the perpetrator they were seeking, since his targets seemed to be adolescent boys, but just nasty stuff all around. Havers was in neighborhoods that were no place for women, even police officers with weapons. Nkata was being spotlighted. I was terribly uneasy.
Something bad did indeed happen, but even after that terrible blow (and it was terrible), the foreboding didn’t go away. The others weren't safe. I started thinking, if you were tired of writing about them, why didn’t you just stop? You are not Arthur Conan Doyle writing about Sherlock Holmes. You didn’t have to do this. You are not at Reichenbach Falls; you cannot bring them back.
There are at least six people who have become indispensable to these plots, and I feared for all of them. The shifts to the thinking of some of the lesser characters didn’t help me at all. Oh, yes, they caught the perpetrator and the copycat – and even the accidental shooter (or is that incidental?). No one else is injured…but they are not okay. Every person who interacts with the central characters is damaged.
I purposely have not divulged what did happen in this book, in case you are a fan. But Elizabeth George, you didn’t have to do it this way!
