4.5 stars. This is such a great series! I wasn't planning to finish this book so quickly but I literally could not stop reading.Also the hotel maid describes Inspector Lynley as having a smile like Sting (Police) so, yeah, I would say that the TV actor portraying Lynley in that TV series (which I couldn't watch) is way off mark.

This wasn’t as good as the first book in the series, but it was still a solid crime novel. I’ll reserve my judgment until after I’ve finished the third book. Then I’ll decide whether I want to continue reading the series or not.

This is one of a series of novels about Elizabeth George's creation Inspector Lynley and his sidekick Sergeant Havers. These two characters are a chalk-and-cheese coupling. The aristocrat Thomas Lynley is steeped in tradition but fighting his destiny, wanting more meaning to his life. The council-house bred Barbara Havers is an ambivalent character, saddled with an antipathy to all that Lynley stands for combined with a chip on her shoulder. Add to the mix a doomed romantic liaison and you have

UPDATE 2/13/18 ... marvelous even on re-reading ... the murders were complicated and the tension maintained throughout ... but the essence of the story is the way those murders impact EG's continuing characters, and the relationships between those characters ... Barbara Havers (my favorite) plays a major role in this one.***I read this at least a decade ago, and am re-reading it now to take another look at the outstanding way EG, one of my favorite authors, frames a story. This comes as I am edi...

“A Great Deliverance” started slowly because we could not tell who the protagonists were. The CID partnership needed working out and we disliked Barbara. Thomas squirmed over Deborah’s marriage to Simon. There was a lot to navigate and the crimes were abhorrent. However, there came such an ecstatic reunion for a Mother; that this and elements I appreciated, vaulted my feedback to five stars. Now Barbara & Thomas work together well and are friends and the sweet Simon & Deborah reappear. Inexplica...

Rating: 3.875* of fiveThe Book Report: Inspectory Thomas Lynley, aka the eighth Earl of Asherton, is a hard-working man, but even he likes a few days' rest after chasing from pillar to post in solving brutal crimes. His rest is denied him by a call from his boss, at home, on a Sunday: A murder has occurred, in Scotland, and *only* Lynley can be trusted to investigate because it involves a famous Peer of the Realm.Uh-oh.Yeah, uh-oh and in spades, as Lynley tromps ill-temperedly up to Scotland whe...

"Why on earth did 'x' kill 'x'? More than anything else, Tommy [Lynley], that seems so senseless to me," says a character on page 368 of 374. The author realizes the inclusion of a stupendously brutal 2nd (or 3rd, depending on how you see the time-line) murder of a 16 y/0 kid was a huge mistake: sadistic only for shock value. With a minute of editing, George could have removed that murder and the story would have worked...maybe. I lost track of who was going to bed with who at the 200-page mark,...

I like it! It cuts to the chase without too much nonsense, the introduction of all the characters is brisk, to the point.Also, there was none of that annoying fascination with the scenery like there was in the first one where it read like the author had visited UK for the first time and was overly excited about it. Payment in Blood went on to the investigation of the murder pretty quickly in comparison to other books of similar nature which was excellent. Usually there's alot of that setting the...

My first audiobook of the year, and immensely enjoyed it.I have read this book earlier, a decade or so ago, but jumbled up in the series, and last year decided to read this police procedural series in order, as the emotional lives of the police and their near and dear ones are given as much importance as the crime and its solution. This book deals with a closed room murder of a much hated playwriter in a stately mansion turned hotel on a snowy winter night. The house is inhabited by the people i...

I loved George's first book in this series and this follow-up was another solid entry. At first it started out somewhat reminiscent of Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, a group of people coming together at a remote site and voila, murders. Someone is the killer but who? About halfway through you realize there is more here than meets the eye and the last quarter, I was like WHAAAT?! (In a good way).Secrets revealed that had long stayed hidden may motivate the killer to murder again. Alo...

This is just my second book by Elizabeth George and I am quite impressed. I was unaware of the BBC series about Inspector Lynley but I was aware of the high average rating (4.0) with more than 10,000 entries.This is a very high-quality entry into the genre of British police procedural murder mysteries. The setup is classic: a locked room mystery of how is an unpleasant author and playwright murdered while attending a weekend dinner party at a remote location in Scotland. Inspector Lynley and his...

Payment in Blood by Elizabeth George (Inspector Lynley, #2)A band of theatrical performers including a producer as well as an actress hoping to make her comeback in this play written by the successful playwright, Joy Sinclair. the play itself had already been decided upon but that's where the agreement among the cast ends. Joy Sinclair announces at their meeting that a new play has been completed and it is to replace the former play. The newer version is passed to the players(?) and chaos erupts...

3.5 stars.A decent-enough murder mystery that had a couple of twists and turns and kept me guessing until the end. I did feel like the middle of the novel dragged out a little too much though. Plus while I liked the character Simon/St. James better in this one than I did when he was first introduced in A Great Deliverance, I still find that I don't really care about side characters like Deborah or Lady Helen. Maybe I'm being overly picky, but I'd probably prefer the novel to just focus on the wo...