Elizabeth George, Playing for the Ashes
Busy week-end for the odd but efficient team composed of Thomas Lynley, the handsome, aristocratic, distinguished and rich Detective Inspector whom readers have learned to know in the previous mysteries and for his antithesis: plain, working-class and outspoken Sergeant Barbara Havers. Thomas Lynley is getting nervous as he is about to pop the question to Helen Clyde; his best friend, who has become, in the past months, much more than this… Meanwhile, Barbara is trying to overcome the guilt of sending her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s, to a home for the elderly. She intends to visit her during the week-end in order to make up for past weeks absence. She is also getting used to living alone in her small new cottage… The only person she has spoken to so far is the Pakistani grocer.
But whatever plans the two police officers had made will have to be postponed. In a Kent cottage, the asphyxiated body of Kenneth Fleming, a famous batsman, has been found. Everything indicates a murder: the arsonist has set a device composed of a cigarette and matches but the fire failed to catch completely. Plenty of evidence for a murder and also a plethora of suspects: Gabriella Pattern; Kenneth’s lover, who has mysteriously disappeared, Jean Cooper; Kenneth’s wife and childhood sweetheart, who doesn’t seem to accept that Ken left her and their children, Jimmy; the eldest of the children, who was supposed to be vacationing in Greece with his father at the time of the murder, and other people who gravitate around Kenneth, including those who have an interest in the approaching national selections for England’s cricket team.
Kenneth, who, as a youth, was a prodigy child, a clever boy gifted for school and sports, loved by everybody who chanced to meet him, has however met an untimely death at someone else’s hands. If everybody seemed to have motive and/or opportunity, who killed him? And who is Olivia, whose narration parallels the main thread and most of all, what is her connection to the murder?
All these questions of course will be answered by the end of the book. George wrote Playing for the Ashes following some guidelines such as the thematic of the ashes, also happening to be the name of a cricket distinction (One has to admire the appropriateness of George’s titles), and the largest thematic of love: passionate love, filial love, motherly love, unrequited love: love in all its forms is at the core of this mystery…
During this journey through a very delicate investigation the personal life of our favourite police officers will take new turns: sentimental complications for Lynley and an unexpected friendship for Havers…
Once again, as with her previous novels, George has concocted a masterpiece. It is not about the originality of the plot, or even the surprise brought by the revelation of the culprit but rather it is about a slow and riveting unraveling (681 pages in my paperback copy) of dark secrets, indestructible ties, insurmountable guilt and ironic fates.
George’s novels are about ordinary people who lead ordinary lives in which a series of unfortunate events ultimately leads to murder. The setting (England) gives this atmosphere that suits the genre so well. What makes George’s prose so interesting is first of all that she can write, unlike many mystery writers who can’t, because publishers often mistake the genre for a minor one and tend to publish whoever provides a nasty serial-killer and unlikely but numerous twists-and-turns. George, unlike them, has a very fine style from which the mystery world benefits greatly and also, she has a gift for observing and reproducing human nature and its manifold manifestations, its flaws and contradictions. She renews herself with each book, mastering the conventions of the genre, which allows her to play with them or even break them. Elizabeth George is a writer who seems to create from scratch every time: she reinvents the detective story with each new book…
Rating: 5/5
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment