Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness
With No One as Witness takes us only weeks after the resolution of the mystery of A Place of Hiding. A serial killer has been killing teenaged boys, most black or mixed race. Unfortunately, the police have been unable to identify the murders as committed by the same hand, and now, Assistant Commissioner Hillier (who took the head of the service after Malcolm Webberly was left seriously injured after being ran over by a car) fears accusations of racism and neglect. Therefore, to prevent them, he promotes Nkata sergeant and parades him in front of TV cameras. Constable Barbara Havers, who is striving to regain her former position of sergeant, is frustrated by the situation, and even Nkata takes his promotion with a grain of salt, because he knows it has nothing to do with his human or professional qualities…
But before the usual team has time to sort anything out, the killer strikes again. Apparently, he is taunting them and his compulsion to kill is stronger than ever. Hillier imposes a profiler on the case, which is only a first step in provoking Lynley’s anger and frustration… Meanwhile, Barbara, who makes her situation worse by not being a team player, disobeys orders when her intuition leads her to Colossus, an organization set to help young people in trouble and keep them off the streets…
With No One As Witness is quite different from other Elizabeth George’s novels. If anything, it reminded me a bit of In the Presence of the Enemy, in the sense that in both George departed from the Britishness of her usual novels, making it an American-style thriller, even though it takes place in London. I think it is a shame that she departed once more from what she does best. I missed the coziness of other novels, and if she had to tackle something different, I should have wished she did it better. For instance, when the police have some suspects on a side, and one witness on the other, how can they not think about showing photographs of the suspects to the witness? This one plot flaw really bothered me… Also, after reading such authors as Patricia Cornwell, I kept wondering why the investigation was not more heavy on forensics. Of course there is always Simon St-James helping, but couldn’t he be more helpful? One wondered why there were not some car or clothes fibers or more telling things on at least one of the scenes of crime. Here the forensics almost seemed anecdotic, and did not much to make things move forward… I am not expecting forensic novels from George, but I wish she would stop ambitioning large-scope novels and come back to the odd body found in the moors or in a cottage.
Then there is the matter of the “big shocker”, which I will try not to spoil for the reader (but if you really want it to be a surprise, don’t read on). There is, indeed, a major loss in With No One As Witness, amongst the characters we have now known and loved (or not!) for long and there is enough foreboding to alert the reader before this actually happens. After reading reviews on amazon.com, I could see that many readers were devastated. It always amuses me to see the reactions of readers when a writer kills off one of his main characters. It is almost as if the author has a moral responsibility about his characters, considering some people’s reactions (this always makes me think of Stephen King’s Mysery, and how insightful this novel is!), as if the writer didn’t have the right to do whatever she wanted with characters she gave life to! Beside the amusement, I am not one to judge (as long as George doesn’t touch a hair on Barb’s head, that is!!!), and I can see what George was trying to do, and this is something about the wheel of fortune turning, and I am quite curious to see how this will affect the dynamics between the characters.
Well, as a conclusion, I am not sure I like the turn things are taking, not for the main characters, but for the sake of the mysteries themselves. For me, George is a writer of mysteries, not cozies, but mysteries with a cozy side nonetheless. There are good thriller writers out there, and I am not sure George is cut out to be one of those. I wish she would not feel obliged to raise the stakes each time. She is a gifted writer who can show every nuance of human psyche. So, please, let’s stop the races in the streets of London or the misuse of Lynley’s Bentley, and let’s go back to solid mystery novels such as Playing for the Ashes or A Traitor to Memory and let’s keep Lynley’s ties unwrinkled from now on!
Rating: 3/5
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