Lynley's an aristo turned stalwart of the New Scotland Yard, who has had a colorful variety of experts on whom he's drawn for his cases. These councilors, professional, domestic, and social, included a love interest who wasn't interested in him for a long time, but almost always featured one of the most original of side-kicks, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. The action of the novels came to be increasingly located in places with which the average reader -- particularly a non-UK reader -- was not likely to be familiar. This 2018 installment of 680 pages take the reader to a guidebook tour of the medieval college town of Ludlow, Shropshire.
The book is titled (stet lower case) the punishment she deserves; A Lynley Novel. But 300 pages in, we've hardly seen Lynley. Yet we've had 300 pages of a character this reader at least has never liked, or even found interesting, the very nasty Isabelle Ardrey, who is an alcoholic, a bad alcoholic, and her plan to drive Barbara Havers out of the service, by either fair or foul means.
I have always loved Havers, but she's constricted in this novel as far as personality is concerned, by Isabelle, and Chief Hillier, who is also kind of an aristocrat, though he doesn't have the ancient title that Lynley does. They both have circumscribed her agency. This unholy alliance of Isabelle and Hillier is also targeted against Lynley, despite Lynley, when working particularly with Havers, having racked up a long record of successfully closing cases. It doesn't help matters that Lynley -- while we readers told him to KNOW BETTER! -- had a nasty affair with Isabelle, which her nastiness and drinking ended. But ultimately, as from the beginning of her appearance about three books ago in Lynley and Havers lives, Isabelle is just nasty -- never interesting.
George gives her readers a pile-on of detail of Ludlow, of what the characters think, do, and particularly what they eat and drink, but even her long-term primaries don't come to life in the punishment she deserves. Nor do the new-for-this-novel supporting characters -- we can't tell them apart or remember their names -- not even the long term favorites such as smart, charming, nice cookie, Dorothea, who is Lynley's assistant and who will drag Havers into a more presentable, more social life, no matter what -- nor does Ludlow for that matter. We've had 300 pages of a 680 page novel, in which nothing has yet happened. This isn't interesting, even though supposedly nothing happens because drunk and mean girl Isabelle, and Hillier, don't want anything to happen. We don't even know who the 'she' of the title refers to, or what the deserved 'punishment' is for.
Past 300 + pages in, Lynley enters. Things move more quickly, but what happens is that Havers backtracks him through everything either she, or Ardrey, or she and Ardrey, looked at, the people they talked to, etc. in the previous 300 + pages. Of course, without Ardrey's treacherous, impatient, distracted, selfish, drink addled, nasty interference, we, like Lynley and Havers learn more, but we still haven't a clue as to who the she is who should be punished, and for what. There are still 380 pages to go when Lynley truly enters, yet even now, he's not really present. He's following Havers. The only reason for including him in this novel seems to be to keep Havers from sabotaging her chances of keeping her job -- and his -- with the Yard. However, we have no idea why he even wants to keep this job considering all he's been through, and his seemingly zero interest in resolving whether or not a crime has taken place, or interest in anything else either. As every character in every novel makes clear, Lynley doesn't need to work for a living.
Each of the Lynley novels since 2003 Place of Hiding has gotten longer, more tourist guidey -- and ever less interesting. One feels that this yet another successful character in which the author lost interest, because she fan serviced a romance, a romance that ultimately killed -- well, won't say for spoiler reason -- but also Lynley himself, because the writer lost her own love affair with her character. That happened because the author is that good of a writer, and once things took a certain course, other things had to happen and she wasn't going to deny it.
Also, the world of 1988 is so different from the world of 2018, and not just in the UK or the US.
It's time to let Lynley go, despite fans. His world is finished.
BTW, the television adaptations of the Lynley novels have very little to do with the novels and have not served Lynley well.
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