![]() ![]() This superb latest chapter confirms what her growing core of fans has come to realize: The Lynley books constitute the smartest, most gratifyingly complex and impassioned mystery series now being published. Her books are comedies of manners, social studies, psychological case histories, and always, finally, tragedies. More than most of her contemporaries, George is a writer who respects murder in her series of novels featuring Scotland Yard’s wealthy and cultured investigator Thomas Lynley (this is the eighth), she’s less interested in random acts of violence than in the taking of a life as the apex of a melodrama that has seismic effects upon families, classes, and generations. But when he opens an innocuous-looking letter addressed to him at The Source, he discovers that someone else excels at ferreting out secrets as well. But the awful, brutal pointlessness of the crime resonates solemnly throughout the novel, affecting the victim’s family, the suspects, and even the investigators who nearly tear themselves and each other apart trying to make sense of it. Hailed as the 'king of sleaze,' tabloid editor Dennis Luxford is used to ferreting out the sins and scandals of people in exposed positions. There is only one murder in Elizabeth George’s wrenching new mystery The Presence of the Enemy, and it occurs discreetly between chapters - off camera, as it were. ![]()
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