Customer Reviews

Careless in Red

5 star:		(39)
4 star:		(41)
3 star:		(47)
2 star:		(38)
1 star:		(24)

 

 

I've been a fan of Elizabeth George since 1988, when I read her first novel, "A Great Deliverance." Unfortunately, she has now and then produced a book that I've found rather tedious, largely it is heavily populated with secondary characters who have been of little real interest to me. These books, in my opinion, have included "In Pursuit of the Proper Sinner" and "A Place of Hiding."

Sadly, "Careless in Red" falls into that category. The premise is that Thomas Lynley, in dazed mourning after the violent death of his wife, Lady Helen, just weeks earlier, and having resigned (he thinks) from New Scotland Yard, is hiking the Cornish coastline when he stumbles across the murder of a young man. Naturally, he is recruited by the investigating officer to assist, particularly by looking into the background of a female suspect, while around him swirl intrigue and conflict involving the family of the dead man and several other people associated with him. As is usual in a George novel, these many characters have secrets -- some decades-old -- along with sexual/marital problems, parent/child problems, hatreds, resentments, and neuroses, which are examined at great length.

Normally, George's large casts of dysfunctional characters add depth and psychological interest. Here, however, the cast had me rolling my eyes in boredom. Perhaps I've read too many George books, so that her approach and self-consciously very studied prose style have begun to pall; or perhaps the surfing/rock climbing theme just didn't excite me; or perhaps I felt that the setting, a relatively isolated area of Cornwall, felt a little claustrophobic. (I tend to prefer George's London-based novels over those that take us to rural locations.) Whatever was irritating me, the reality is that I WAS irritated and grimly urging the author to "just get on with it, please."

The novel sparkles to life, not surprisingly, whenever Barbara Havers appears. There can be no doubt that Havers is George's most appealing and imaginative creation, given that the other regulars -- Lynley, and Simon and Deborah St. James, who do not play roles here -- tend to be a bit two-dimensional and repetitive in terms of their personalities and ongoing relationship crises. Havers crackles with energy in this book and manages to drag it out of the Slough of Despond in which everyone else is wallowing. George may once have been enchanted by the romantic and unlikely notion of a belted earl who is also a homicide detective, but she has clearly found that Havers offers considerably more scope for character development. If it hadn't been for Barbara in her rumpled clothes, puffing away on her ever-present cigarettes and puncturing the pretensions of everyone around her, I might well have chosen, for the very first time, not to finish a book by Elizabeth George.

But I did finish, and I'm not sorry. "Careless in Red" picks up a bit towards the end, which is laden with ambiguity -- not a fault, in my view, though some readers may experience frustration. And because the novel is undeniably well-written and thoughtful, I don't feel entirely negative about it and recognize that it simply didn't address my personal tastes. I can't fully recommend it, but there may well be some readers who will find it a considerably more enjoyable experience than I did.

After my disappointment with Elizabeth George's previous two novels, I was a bit concerned when the next book in this ongoing series, Careless in Red was announced. But in having gamely read her series, and knowing that sometimes an author will go off on a tangent, I decided to give this one a chance. If it failed, well, I could always go back to the earlier novels of the series, and leave it at that.

Thomas Lynley, aristocrat and Scotland Yard detective, has retreated to the wilds of the Cornish coast to cope with the loss of his beloved wife and unborn child. He has deliberately cut himself off from everyone he knows, heading off to a future that even he can't comprehend. But the real world is about to intrude and shatter his illusions.

A rock climber has fallen to his death in a remote cove, and unfortunately for Lynley, he's the one who discovers the body. Almost at the same time, the owner of the nearby cottage, Daidre Trahair, returns as he is breaking into her home, and together they report the death. The downside to all of this is that it presents both of them as potential subjects.

For Santo Kerne has been murdered, and as with a good thriller, there's plenty of potential criminals here. Santo was an energetic young surfer, mad for women, and still able to exercise a great deal of charm -- enough to where it's just odd that anyone would kill him.

And the local police chief, DI Bea Hannaford, has plenty of problems of her own. From an ex-husband who is also a police officer, to a teenage son that fill of fire and rebellion, and an assistant who makes mere incompetence look good -- she's not a happy woman. Especially when she finds out who Lynley is.

The victim's family are also not much of a treat either. They've been renovating a dinosaur of an Edwardian hotel, seeking to lure the tourists with promising adventures in the wild splendours of Cornwall, but money is tight, and when Ben Kerne's wife, Dellen, is less than stable, it threatens to bring back a lot of family secrets.

Especially when it seems that Ben Kerne was involved in a very similar death some decades earlier...

I have to say, Elizabeth George is back with this novel. There's plenty of details, an ingeneous use of the colour red, and the fraught relationships here are stretched so tight that they hum with tension. Which is a real plus. Right up to the final pages, the story keeps at a very tight pace, and I found myself reading well into the night, wanting to know just what happens next.

Fans of Barbara Havers may be disappointed that she doesn't appear until partway through the novel, but she is always a treat to watch in action, and she doesn't miss a beat in this one. Especially when she is working with Bea Hannaford, the two of them in a wicked variation of good cop/bad cop.

The exotic names and locals of the Cornish countryside add a very rich flavour to the story. Another plus are the use of sports such as surfing and rock climbing. It's an England that we're familiar with, but not quite.

But naturally, where Ms. George excells is in the internal worlds of her characters. This time, the one that really takes center stage is Thomas Lynley himself. Mentally fragile, adrift, the reader is treated to a very new and fresh look at a character that has appeared in previous novels as someone clever and forthright, seemingly unable to break. It works here, and works well. The relationship that he develops with Daidre is fascinating to watch, and we get to see just how human he is under the cool exterior of a posh swell.

I was really taken by surprise by this one. The story was tightly written and compelling, with the author plotting and drawing the reader into this story of families and communities tied together by secrets and old conflicts. The theme of family ties and the tenuous and rather tricky love between fathers and sons are explored. What I did like was that George is not at all shy about looking at the uglier side of human emotions and motivations, and she uses them to great effect to create this moody thriller.

Happily recommended, and a must-read for any fans of the series. Four and a half stars rounded up to five.

Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley has suffered a huge personal loss, and is walking the rugged cliffs of Cornwall to come to terms with it. "Careless in Red" is not only the story of his struggle with grief, it is the story of several families and their similar struggles, with a focus on the understandable (but vain) effort of parents to control the lives of their children.

In the course of his walk, Lynley finds the body of young Santo Kerne at the bottom of the cliff he had been climbing, and as the investigation of the death develops, the superintendent is drawn into it at the behest of local police Detective Inspector Bea Hannaford, who is having family problems of her own. DS Barbara Havers makes an appearance--and a somewhat unusual partner for DI Hannaford.

Cornwall and its surfing world are well handled in this new Lynley novel. (One minor complaint is that some terms of climbing are not explained.) While not all the characters are believable (voluptuous Dellen Kerne and her son Santo are among those who test that limit), most are fully rounded and lifelike; and several are very amusing. (I really savored DI Hannaford and company.) Some of the descriptive passages and dialogues are overwritten--meant, I think, to be poetic, but seeming instead over-literary. The resolution of the murder is not particularly satisfying, not because of the identity of the murderer, but because of the final mechanics of the solution.

I found the novel very enjoyable, and if you are a Lynley and Havers fan, I think you will too. The complications of parenthood are nicely explored, and the bittersweet consequences of love and loss, Lynley's and others, will draw you in.

One of the earlier reviewers suggests that this novel is over-written, with passages meant, perhaps, to be poetic, but seeming instead over-literary. While I agree, I'd suggest another phrase.

Bad. The writing is bad. It's what college comp teachers used to call Purple Prose.

Elizabeth George is a writer I've always admired. Her prose is generally intelligent, literate, and vivid. Either she's now trying to win a Booker Prize (give it up, honey, you're an American) or her laptop has acquired a dire virus, because this book oozes with infelicitous constructions. An ugly grocery store is "sprawled like a nasty thought" at a crossroads; a pathologist is "thin as an ageing spinster's marital hopes;" a girl's collarbones protrude "like the excrescent evidence of dutch elm disease on the bark of a tree." (_What?_)

Please. This prose is trying too hard.

While these phrases certainly leap off the page, they don't do anything to advance the plot or theme or to provide fresh mental images - indeed, some don't even scan, so to speak -- and good prose shouldn't call such raucous attention to itself.

Then there are the names. No one doubts that Ms George does her homework on settings. Indeed, some of her books have sunk under the sheer weight of geographic and historic detail. Here she adds hard-to-remember names to the mix, lest we miss that everyone is in Cornwall. There's Selevan Penrule, Cadan Angarrack, Daidre Trahair, Ione Soutar, Benesek, Santo, and Dellan Kerne, and Aladara Pappos, a Greek, thrown in for good measure. George would, of course, scorn giving us a Greek named Maria or Daphne. (As a passing thought, I pray that the series never takes Ms George to Wales.) Here, I virtually wept with relief at the local DI's name: Beatrice Hannaford. I did, however, like the parrot named Pooh -- until I learned it was for excrement, not Winnie.

Elizabeth George specializes in miserable families. Since all her readers know that, it's probably unfair to complain, but the misery here is virtually unrelieved. The theme of fathers failing to know their children is older than the Lear plot, but that doesn't make it any the less depressing.

We don't hear Barbara Havers' voice until page 227, and she doesn't appear for another eighty pages. I'm a Havers fan, and she's barely present. Sadly, this long-awaited novel reminds me of A Place of Hiding, my least-favorite entry in the series.

Lynley's back! If this news thrills you, then you've already discovered the wonderful novels of Elizabeth George. If you haven't yet encountered the titled Englishman/police detective and his marvelous colleague, Barbara Havers, it's high time you did.

Mourning the recent loss of his wife, Lynley is hiking the shorelines of his home county, Cornwall, when he discovers the body of a young man at the base of a cliff. Accident or murder? The local police chief sees Lynley as a witness--and possibly a suspect. To help the police (and clear his own name), he lingers in the seaside town, meeting a vivid gallery of people with various connections to the victim. The grieving Lynley's reluctant entry into the investigation might just be his ticket back to the world of the living.

As ever, George's mystery is solid, her characters are brilliantly complex, and her writing style is as elegant as it is eloquent. This series is sheer pleasure, and CARELESS IN RED is an excellent new addition to it. Highly recommended.

I've been reading George for years and have devoured every one of her novels but, lately, it seems like they haven't quite been up to snuff with some of her earlier efforts. This novel was a real case in point.

One of the reasons why I feel that George is such a superb author is because of her very literary style. However, there is a point at which this particular style can be carried too far, and George is crossing that line more and more. This novel contains some very long and meandering passages that have absolutely no impact on the plot of the novel. The effect of this is to make it sound like George is rambling and that is not good. She waxes at length about the Cornish coastline and I found myself thinking, "Enough, I get it already!" In fact, there is such a propensity for doing this in the novel that I found that I was losing the plot threads. How can I keep up with all the characters when George abandons them frequently for paragraph after paragraph of superfluous prose?

The variety of characters in the novel is interesting but keeping track of all of them is rather daunting at times. I consider it a strength that George presents the reader with multiple points of view rather than having a narrower focus. To me, it is interesting to get into the heads of the people who are touched by the crime, to find out what impact said crime has on them. The down side of this style is that, naturally, some characters are more interesting than others. I didn't think there were any particularly weak characters in the book, per se, but I was definitely more interested in some of them than I was in others. I also felt that, at times, their stories were being dragged out rather too much so that the merest crumbs were being offered to the reader. This seemed to particularly be the case with the characters of Alan and Kerra.

Lynley is a character that I do enjoy but it seems like he's grown a bit stagnant. It seems almost like Helen's murder was a way to try to give him some new facets or something. I wasn't quite sure I bought the way that he totally fell apart and then seemed to put himself back together rather quickly. At times, Lynley feels more like a cipher than a person and I can't help but wonder if maybe George has reached the limits of what she can do with his character. He is certainly likable but he's not all the compelling.

The character who is compelling is Havers. I found myself growing positively cheerful when she finally made her appearance in the novel. In Havers George has created one of the most unique and diverse characters in contemporary fiction. Havers seems so alive that it wouldn't surprise me if she were to walk off the page, which is more than can be said for Lynley. The appearance of Havers is what really saved the novel for me in the end. Once she was in the picture, the dialog became more sparkling and witty and there was someone to liven up what seemed to be a rather dull cast of characters.

The mystery itself was less than compelling, perhaps because the reader never gets a real sense of the victim. He is more or less dismissed as a playboy and it's hard to take any real interest in him. George would have been better served by making the victim a more multi-dimensional character as it would have given his death greater impact. As it was, the mystery seemed less about the death itself and more about how it inconvenienced other characters and brought out the various and assorted secrets they had been attempting to conceal. The revelation of the perpetrator was meant to shock but the killer's identity wasn't all that well concealed and so by the time it was revealed, I had already figured it out. Perhaps if the book had been more focused it would have been a good reveal and the killer's motives would have been more compelling. As it was, the ending was frankly anticlimactic.

Hopefully George will narrow her focus in her next novel and hopefully there will be a whole lot more of Havers. I've never quite been able to put my finger on why George will concentrate more on characters like Lynley and the St. Jameses than she does on Havers.

Having read everything Ms. George has written, fiction and nonfiction, I am a fan. I bought both the Kindle and the hardback editions of Careless in Red in order to read the new novel quickly and also to own a hardback for Ms. George to autograph when she comes to our small town for a writer's conference in late May.

I am not a fan of this new novel. Granted most characters are believable and in the case of DI Hannaford darn right laudable, but the characters I most wanted fleshed out were merely the bare bones Ms. George used to hook long time readers into a largely sociological study of adolescent angst and midlife crisis set amongst British surfers and oversexed matrons. Even the smattering of antiquated vocabulary did little to earn my interest. (Although I do tip my hat to Ms. George's literary recognition of her move to western Washington State.)

If readers want to delve again into the lives of Lynley and Havers or if they want a complex whodunit, they'll be disappointed by Careless in Red. I confess to feeling more cheated by this entry in the Lynley series than by its predecessor. What Came Before He Shot Her can stand alone and may be appreciated as a deserved writing detour for the author of an otherwise satisfying British mystery series. Careless in Red continues down a path away from the original series and readers who have waited patiently for the reappearance of the author's central characters will be left wondering if Ms. George has left Sir Thomas by the wayside for good and all.

Ms. George has written of the differences between her serial mysteries and those of Agatha Christie. Ms. George reveals on her website that she chose to write about the development of her characters rather than engage in a "mental game" with readers. Ms. Christie's characters are "frozen in time" whereas Ms. George's characters will grow and change. Perhaps that is why I have found this particular novel so lacking. Lynley has been frozen on that terrible doorstep for George's readers for years now. Nothing new is revealed in the current novel that couldn't have been easily imagined by any devoted reader. That is the real failure of this novel. Ms. George has departed once too often from her own style to suit the devoted fan.

I am a huge fan of Elizabeth George and, in particular, of Thomas Lynley. But to say this book was a disappointment is an understatement. It was way overwritten with many side stories that don't contribute at all to the outcome, nor do these story lines get wrapped up in a satisfactory way; they sort of trail off to nowhere. George must have made good use of a thesaurus because she uses the most arcane words imaginable. At the end Lynley is left wondering and so are we. I finished it and thought "Is that all there is? Is that it???"

One would be hard pressed to find a more perfect reader for the latest Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley mystery than London born Charles Keating. After all, who else could neatly toss off such lines as "A bit daft, that, but it's summick to do, innit." with easy authenticity?

An experienced actor who appeared with the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford-Upon-Avon, he soon became known to American audiences with his work on TV's Another World and numerous Broadway performances. He brings both decisiveness and keen understanding to his narration.

As many will remember Lynley lost his wife in a previous novel, "No One To Witness" when she was fatally shot outside their London home. Numb with grief Lynley has fled London, going to Cornwall where he walks along the coast. Is as if he knows the miles he walks will not bring solace but perhaps some relief from the pain of his loss.

It is on one of these walks that he comes across a dead body, that of a rock climber, a young boy from the nearby village of Casvelyn. Of course, Lynley immediately notifies the local police, and another "of course" - knowing George the death was not an accident. Scotland Yard sends Havers to assist Lynley in the investigation and hopefully bring him back to London and the job he does so well.

The deceased was far from an innocent youth, having bedded a good number of the female population of Casvelyn. Thus, there's certainly no dearth of those who would have wished him dead and gone.

As readers of George have come to know her plots are complex and wonderfully character driven. Careless In Red is one more engrossing story from this award winning author (the Anthony and Agatha awards, and the Grand Prix de Litterature Policiere among them).

Highly recommended.

- Gail Cooke

The author has explained her execution of Helen Clyde as part of her plan to keep her characters evolving. I can accept this; however, this next "Lynley" mystery has Lynley and Havers as almost incidental characters and does not reward the readers with the promised development. Ms. George: Get back to Lynley, Havers, Deborah and St. James and the heart of the series. You want us to care about the key people but you have strayed too far into areas and plots which are mainly of interest only to you. You may feel that your writing brings your readers back to you, but you are not Tolstoy. You are a good writer who created characters and plots that drew in a readership. Remember us.