It has been too long since I read/reviewed an Elizabeth George Novel (since August, 2015, in fact, for the release of A Banquet of Consequences). Some things don’t change: as I said then, “I LOVE Elizabeth George, and have been reading the Inspector Lynley novels (or, as I prefer to call them, the Lynley-Havers novels) since the mid-1990s when introduced to them by a fellow librarian when we were stuck in an airport.”
For those familiar with the series, I’ll start with a couple of things I hoped for with Banquet back in 2015, and which I was still hoping for as 2018’s Punishment arrived: One of them involved Barbara’s neighbors, the Azhars, Taymullah and Haddiyah, who as I noted in my 2015 review “…had fled to Pakistan, and I admit I was hoping for an update on this whole complex relationship.” And, as in 2015, when I said: “Familiar characters appear, including Winston Nkata, Isabelle Ardery (Lynley’s former lover and current boss to both him and Detective Sergeant Havers), Daidre the veterinarian who seemed to be a likely candidate to bring Lynley out of his ongoing mourning following his wife’s murder a couple of books ago…like getting an update on old friends.”
Neither of those sub-plotlines was addressed in Banquet, but I continued to hold out hope as I received “The Punishment She Deserved,” (thanks to Penguin Group VIKING and NetGalley).
As the story begins, Barbara Havers is in deep poop as she is partnered with Isabelle Ardery. They are sent to Ludlow, a small historic village that has been rocked by the death of the local deacon. It looks like suicide, but there are rumors of pedophilia, which has the deacon’s father outraged to the point of complaining to his local member of Parliament – so of course Scotland Yard is brought in and the two women are assigned to review the work done by the local police when they investigated the man’s unexpected death.
Isabelle wants to just do a cursory review and get the hell out of Ludlow, back to her demons and personal problems surrounding her ex-husband and their two sons. But Barbara can’t ignore the things that she sees: they just nag at her, and she tries to pursue every lead she can despite Isabelle ordering her to just review the prior report, and don’t open any cans of worms. Anyone familiar with Barbara knows this is not bloody likely!
As usual, George introduces characters in such a way that we quickly feel we KNOW them. For example, Finn Freeman, a young man around whom much of the facts seem to revolve, “…wasn’t a picture either. His clothes…favored excessively tattered jeans and an extremely threadbare flannel shirt. He wore sandals…but his black-apainted toenails did not delight. On his reight anjle was a piece of braided leather, and a bulbous know of the same material formed an earring tht looked like an excrescence on hius left lobe. He actually might not have been a bad looking young man, but taken as a whole, he was something that might have been created by Munch.”
And I love the description of the Underground station: the…” crowd in the underground…ignored one another as per usual, jostling about like kittens struggling for a nursing position while also attempting to text, read their newspapers, listen to…music via earbuds…”
And her language used for various characters is incredibly revelatory as to their nature. For example, Thomas Lynley (aka Lord Asherton) gets out of his car and looks across the street: “…the banner announcing Titus Andronicus had lettering in which the uppercase letters both transformed into pools of blood beneath them. At least the audience would be forewarned, he thought.” PERFECT!
By contrast, Trevor Freeman, owner of a local fitness center and husband of a Clover Freeman, a local high-ranking policewoman, is involved in a debate with her, and might have prevailed “…had he managed to keep his bloody wits about him, but he kept getting sidelined by his dick.”
The plot is good (especially once Lynley is on the scene, working with Havers), and her language manages to make me learn without making me feel stupid: “…his demands…became as furious as they were adamantine.” (yay! A new word!) There are also typical Britishisms, such as chuffed (opposite meaning to what I suspected) and weir. And, there are several uses of words for which I THOUGHT I knew the meaning, but learned I was wrong (or ignorant of the specific use in this book): scourge, grass and caravan all had meaning different from what generally think when I encounter them.
Alongside the language and characterization, there is the excellent police procedural and complex plotting: as Clover tells Trevor, “The truth never means a thing. When it comes to innocence or guilt, the trut is the first casualty in an investigation.” Because much of the plot turns on the inadequate police staffing in small towns (based on reality in the U.K. these days), we see a clear contrast between the methods of Scotland Yard and those of the local police, somewhat beleaguered by the reductions in staff.
Overall, a very satisfying read. SPOILER AHEAD: I am, however, still waiting for the advancement of the subplots mentioned at the start of this review. Nonetheless, five stars.