I have read and appreciated most of Elizabeth George’s Scotland Yard detective novels featuring the aristocratic Inspector Thomas Lynley, his slovenly yet astute assistant Barbara Havers, his long-time associates, forensic specialist Simon St. James and Simon’s wife, photographer Deborah St. James, and other recurring characters from New Scotland Yard and from Lynley’s personal set of friends and acquaintances. The series began in 1988 with the novel A Great Deliverance, and Believing the Lie is the seventeenth book to feature these same characters as they investigate murder while dealing with the intense drama and psychological trauma that such work involves.

When I reviewed Steig Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo a few weeks ago at The Point, I said that novel crossed the invisible line that I have for my own use between acceptable, thought-provoking, and informative literature and that which travels into the realm of the prurient, salacious, and gratuitously violent. For me, Elizabeth George’s novels have always danced around that line, but they have fallen on the side of memorable depictions of the subtleties of evil and of crime and the ways in which our hearts and minds can be so complicated and so difficult to manage. Inspector Lynley is a complicated guy, a man whose aristocratic background would enable him do without a mundane job as a police detective, but who sees himself as needing the job as much as or more than it needs him. His assistant, Havers, is in her own eyes as uncomplicated a person as could be imagined. Nevertheless, as the series develops we see more and more about her and her web of relationships and life-decisions, and even the simple straight-talking Barbara Havers becomes an intricate puzzle of a person with depths of character and perception that can only begin to be fathomed.

And that’s why I like the books. George’s characters are wonderfully complex and yet true-to-life and identifiable. And they’re also so very British, which is loads of fun for an Anglophile like me. The situations they find themselves in, however, are nasty and sometimes obscene. Illicit sex and violence abound. Dilemmas and issues concerning random cruelty, the nature of marriage, the ethics of reproduction, malice and revenge, sexual morality, and the nature of justice are the recurring themes of Ms. George’s detective novels, and although I like the way she explores these themes, I admit to some discomfort with the (not gratuitous but definitely vivid) descriptions of violence and sexual perversion and immorality.

So, am I fer’em er agin’em? Well, I wouldn’t recommend the novels to everyone. However, if you like the psychological depths of P.D. James’s novels and you can tolerate the horrific nature of the crimes in the Steig novels or in the TV series Bones, you would be a candidate for enjoying Elizabeth George’s Inspector Lynley novels. The characters do stay with me and make me care, even when I want to give some of them a good talking to and a dose of gospel truth.

As for this specific installment in the series, Believing the Lie is an absorbing story with repeating instances of deception within dysfunctional families leading to tragic outcomes. And all of the families and individuals in the story are dysfunctional, emotionally broken, and capable of acting on the basis of really poor decisions. In fact, one of my favorite recurring characters in the series, Deborah St. James, does something in this novel that is so wrong that even though she is repentant at the end, I’m finding it difficult to see her repentance as commensurate with the “crime.”

Elizabeth George’s website where you can read more about her and her books.

Thanks to Penguin for making the ARC available for my review. Publication is scheduled for sometime this month.