A Great Deliverance -- Elizabeth George

A lot of people love Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries.  There's a television series based on this series--we have it at the library, and it's constantly out.  I mean it--it gets returned, and I shelve it, and it immediately goes out again.  Her new book (the thirteenth in the series) is generating all sorts of uproar.  So I figured that I should at least know the basics.

"Don't be a bloody fool.  Don't be worse than that--don't be a sentimental fool.  Barbara Havers proved herself incapable of getting along with a single DI for her entire tenure in CID.  She's been back in uniform these past eight months and doing a better job there.  Leave her."

"I didn't try her with Lynley."

"You didn't try her with the Prince of Wales either!  It's not your responsibility to keep moving detective sergeants around until they find a little niche in which they can grow old happily.  It's your responsibility to see that the flaming job gets done. And no job got done with Havers on it.  Admit it!"

"I think she's learned from the experience."

"Learned what?  That being a truculent pigheaded little bitch is not likely to advance her up the ranks?"

Let's just get this part over with:  Tommy Lynley is an Earl.  Not only that, but he definitely exhibits some similarity of character with another nobleman detective.  Lynley thinks of Lord Peter at least once, though, so it didn't feel like a rip-off.  Much. I suspect (hope) that as the series goes on, he develops into much more of a unique character.

Barbara Havers, on the other hand, is not lifted from Dorothy Sayers.  She's as working-class as they come.  At points in the book, it really feels like she's the straight-man in a Wimsey novel--a straight-man with a huge, HUGE chip on her shoulder.

The secondary characters--Simon St. James, the forensics specialist, Lady Helen (Lady Helen!) Clyde, Dorothea Harriman the secretary (who reminded me a lot of Fiona from the Martha Grimes books, actually)--were great fun.

The mystery itself?  For a good long while, it didn't even feel like it was set in the present day.  Which was cool.  Kind of like, again, the Martha Grimes books--set in the present day, but usually they feel like throwbacks, somehow.  But then it turned into a kind of Chinatown-esque "my sister, my daughter, my sister, my daughter" situation.  Which didn't really do it for me.  It didn't flow well.

But I'll try another one.  But mostly because I'm hoping for more Dorothea.