Shattered and changed, Inspector Lynley returns

ELIZABETH GEORGE

Careless in Red
By Elizabeth George
Harper, 626 pp., $27.95

Inspector Lynley is back - barely. In the wake of his wife's murder, in 2005's "With No One As Witness," the aristocratic Thomas Lynley has rejected not only his temporary promotion to detective superintendent of New Scotland Yard, but everything to do with his past life. As Elizabeth George's new book opens, Lynley has turned in his badge and abandoned all the trappings of both his exalted heritage and his London-based career to seek oblivion walking the coast of Cornwall. It's a dangerous hike, as small memorials along the crumbling cliffs constantly remind him. But the eighth earl of Asherton is beyond fear. "He'd come out for this walk unprepared and uncaring that he was unprepared," all part of a "wager with fate" about whether he will survive. Borderline suicidal, wrung out, and exhausted, he is a husk of the man whom George first introduced in 1988's "A Great Deliverance." He is also one of the great character portraits in contemporary crime fiction. Too stricken to embrace a future without his beloved Helen, but too alive to lie down and die, he's Beckett's Estragon in the flesh. He can't go on. He goes on.

This stasis begins to give way when Lynley finds a body on the shore. A young rock climber has tumbled from those treacherous cliffs to his death, and Lynley's basic decency spurs him to notify the authorities. The first house he reaches, however, belongs to another loner, an attractive veterinarian named Daidre Trahair. And even as he finds himself drawn to her, and back to life, Lynley also senses that she is hiding something. Sure enough, the young man's death is revealed to be murder, and as Lynley is unwillingly drafted into helping the understaffed local police department solve the case, he recognizes that Trahair ought to be a prime suspect. Certainly the local detective inspector, Bea Hannaford, thinks so, and she has her doubts about Lynley's sanity as well. So when Lynley's former partner, the disheveled but loyal Barbara Havers, shows up, Hannaford isn't sure whether to be grateful for the assistance or wary about a loyalty that might be stronger than a police inspector's duties.

With this opening, "Careless in Red" ought to be one of George's better books. As usual, she layers in subplots, giving Hannaford an estranged husband and Santo Kerne, the dead climber, a highly dysfunctional family. Havers, as well, seems to be doing particularly poorly without her former adversary and colleague. These complications, all woven into the class differences between vacationers and natives on the Cornish coast, are classic George, one of the main reasons her books tend to be so long and so good.

But in "Careless in Red" length does not signify depth, and repetition rather than revelation bogs down this weighty volume. Havers, for example, seems to have turned from a multifaceted character into a punching bag, as everyone who sees her knocks her appearance. One character looks at her hair and muses, "Hacked over the bathroom sink." The constant insults are neither humorous nor useful in building character. The Kerne family's issues are also one-note, with all its members subject to mother Dellen's peculiar nymphomania, which is explained away too late and too quickly to have any resonance. Ultimately, even Trahair's secrets are simplified, another exhibit in class differences.

In part, the new setting may be to blame. Without such wonderful familiar faces as Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata to fall back on, George had to repopulate her fictional world. But while Lynley is revived by the tale's sad end, his friends and colleagues have neither been replaced nor restored. Even old reliable Havers has been flattened into caricature, with only the next Cornish pasty as a reason to go on.

Clea Simon is a freelance writer and the author of "Cries and Whiskers" (Poisoned Pen Press).