Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #15)

by Elizabeth George Narrated by Charles Keating

Overview

In her most eagerly anticipated novel yet, Elizabeth George brings back Scotland Yard's Thomas Lynley to investigate a ruthless crime.

After the senseless murder of his wife, Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley retreated to Cornwall, where he has spent six solitary weeks hiking the bleak and rugged coastline. But no matter how far he walks, no matter how exhausting his days, the painful memories of Helen's death do not diminish.

On the forty-third day of his walk, at the base of a cliff, Lynley discovers the body of a young man who appears to have fallen to his death. The closest town, better known for its tourists and its surfing than its intrigue, seems an unlikely place for murder. However, it soon becomes apparent that a clever killer is indeed at work, and this time Lynley is not a detective but a witness and possibly a suspect.

The head of the vastly understaffed local police department needs Lynley's help, though, especially when it comes to the mysterious, secretive woman whose cottage lies not far from where the body was discovered. But can Lynley let go of the past long enough to solve a most devious and carefully planned crime?

Editorial Reviews

Some mystery writers want their readers to feel as if they've been pushed out of a plane, suddenly catapulted from the very page into tightly calibrated action that never seems to stop. Elizabeth George approaches her writing differently: "When I'm working on a novel, I plot out ten scenes at a time, which is generally as far as I can go. I know who the killer is, but I don't always know how my detectives are going to figure it out. I also don't know how the subplots are going to work out until I get into the rough draft." Careless in Red unfolds slowly, luring us in with realistic experiential details that heighten the suspense. Set on the rugged Cornish coastline, the mystery finds Thomas Lynley in an unexpected role as a witness.

Patrick Anderson

This is the first of Elizabeth George's novels I've read, and I finished it doubly astonished: at George's exceptional gifts and at my own dimwittedness in neglecting her work for the 20 years she's been publishing…American crime fiction, starting with Dashiell Hammett and continuing through James M. Cain, Ed McBain, John D. MacDonald and current writers such as Robert Crais and Lee Child, has tended to be terse, fast-moving and action-oriented. George has made herself part of an English tradition that is more leisurely and more given to psychological probing. This tradition's other leading practitioners now include P.D. James and Ruth Rendell…readers who value writing that is intelligent, surprising, sexy, funny, compassionate and wise should find Careless in Red a delight.
—The Washington Post

Kirkus Reviews

Thomas Lynley, formerly acting superintendent of New Scotland Yard, returns to his Cornish roots to grieve for his wife Helen and finds a body. Resolutely tramping the seaside cliffs of Cornwall to come to terms with the murder of his pregnant wife (With No One as Witness, 2005), Lynley spies a fallen rock-climber and heads for the nearest cottage to call in his discovery. The cottage belongs to veterinarian Daidre Trahair, who claims not to recognize the victim. She's lying, of course, but Lynley doesn't relay this information to DI Bea Hannaford, now in charge of the case. Instead he calls his former partner, Barbara Havers, and asks her to check out Trahair's background. Havers, under orders from the Yard to help the understaffed Hannaford and nudge Lynley toward returning, heads for Cornwall, where there's no shortage of suspects as to who cut Santo Kerne's climbing gear: discarded lovers, disappointed fathers, surfing experts, long-ago school chums and a demented mum. Every one of them has a secret worth lying to protect, including familial circumstances far more lowly than Lynley's patrician background. As you'd expect from George, a windy exploration of angst, grief and the feelings that pass for love. Much surfing and rock-climbing, but also many wretchedly oblique confrontations and overwrought similes. Even so, it's nice to have Lynley back.

From the Publisher

“One of the most powerful, beautifully nuanced and honest novels to appear in ages. . . . A portrayal of love and loss and secrets and family . . . I didn’t want it to end. When it does, this time most readers will be smiling.” — Plain Dealer (Cleveland)

“Will make new readers instant fans who will then be tempted to read all of George’s Lynley novels.” — USA Today

“One of George’s best books in years. . . . George plays the cross-eddies of a dozen or so characters, making each so vivid. . . . The return is to be immersed in a small village in Cornwall in which everyone’s life becomes an open book.” — Daily News (New York)

“A tale of fathers and son, of revenge served cold, and perhaps, of the perfect crime. But at its heart, it’s a meditation on the importance of fighting every day for even a single, tiny scrap of redemption.” — Times-Picayune (New Orleans)

“Readers who value writing that is intelligent, surprising, sexy, funny, compassionate and wise should find Careless in Red a delight.” — Washington Post

“As is her wont, George will wrench your heart and return it enriched.” — Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Stick with Careless in Red for the deftly drawn local characters, the alluring descriptions of Cornish country and custom, and for a fiendishly clever surprising ending.” — News & Observer (Raleigh)

“Elizabeth George’s Careless in Red is a mystery wrapped in a psychological enigma, which has become true to form for Ms. George....the classic scene of her favorite detective team probing the whys and hows of violent death, yet she has put a twist in that trail....It’s a chaotic and fascinating mix of the kind of which Ms. George excels and she manages to tantalize the reader....Ms. George has outdone herself.” — Washington Times

“Careless in Red is no mere whodunnit. Everyone in this novel has something to hide and something to admit....George lifts us up again. There is hope of renewal, if only we are strong enough to accept it.” — St. Petersburg Times

“Intricate, deeply satisfying.” — Strand magazine

“As readers of George’s top-notch mysteries have come to expect, the plotlines are dense, the characters complex, and there are enough dark secrets to fill Pandora’s box.” — Christian Science Monitor

Product Details

BN ID:	2940173425089
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/06/2008
Series:	Inspector Lynley Series , #15
Edition description:	Abridged

Read an Excerpt

Careless in Red LP
A Novel

Chapter One

He found the body on the forty-third day of his walk. By then, the end of April had arrived, although he had only the vaguest idea of that. Had he been capable of noticing his surroundings, the condition of the flora along the coast might have given him a broad hint as to the time of year. He'd started out when the only sign of life renewed was the promise of yellow buds on the gorse that grew sporadically along the cliff tops, but by April, the gorse was wild with color, and yellow archangel climbed in tight whorls along upright stems in hedgerows on the rare occasions when he wandered into a village. Soon foxglove would be nodding on roadside verges, and lamb's foot would expose fiery heads from the hedgerows and the drystone walls that defined individual fields in this part of the world. But those bits of burgeoning life were in the future, and he'd been walking these days that had blended into weeks in an effort to avoid both the thought of the future and the memory of the past.

He carried virtually nothing with him. An ancient sleeping bag. A rucksack with a bit of food that he replenished when the thought occurred to him. A bottle within that rucksack that he filled with water in the morning if water was to be had near the site where he'd slept. Everything else, he wore. One waxed jacket. One hat. One tattersall shirt. One pair of trousers. Boots. Socks. Underclothes. He'd come out for this walk unprepared and uncaring that he was unprepared. He'd known only that he had to walk or he had to remain at home and sleep, and if he remained at home and slept, he'd come to realise that eventually he wouldwill himself not to awaken again.

So he walked. There had seemed no alternative. Steep ascents to cliff tops, the wind striking his face, the sharp salt air desiccating his skin, scrambling across beaches where reefs erupted from sand and stone when the tide was low, his breath coming short, rain soaking his legs, stones pressing insistently against his soles . . . These things would remind him that he was alive and that he was intended to remain so.

He was thus engaged in a wager with fate. If he survived the walk, so be it. If he did not, his ending was in the hands of the gods. In the plural, he decided. He could not think that there might be a single Supreme Being out there, pressing fingers into the keyboard of a divine computer, inserting this or forever deleting that.

His family had asked him not to go, for they'd seen his state, although like so many families of his class, they'd not made any direct mention of it. Just his mother saying, "Please don't do this, darling," and his brother suggesting, with his face gone pale and always the threat of another relapse hanging over him and over them all, "Let me go with you," and his sister murmuring with her arm round his waist, "You'll get past it. One does," but none of them mentioning her name or the word itself, that terrible, eternal, definitive word.

Nor did he mention it. Nor did he mention anything other than his need to walk. The forty-third day of this walk had taken the same shape as the forty-two days that had preceded it. He'd awakened where he'd fallen on the previous night, with absolutely no knowledge where he was aside from somewhere along the South-West Coast Path. He'd climbed out of his sleeping bag, donned his jacket and his boots, drunk the rest of his water, and begun to move. In mid-afternoon the weather, which had been uneasy most of the day, made up its mind and blew dark clouds across the sky. In the wind, they piled one upon the other, as if an immense shield in the distance were holding them in place and allowing them no further passage, having made the promise of a storm.

He was struggling in the wind to the top of a cliff, climbing from a V-shaped cove where he'd rested for an hour or so and watched the waves slamming into broad fins of slate that formed the reefs in this place. The tide was just beginning to come in, and he'd noted this. He needed to be well above it. He needed to find some sort of shelter as well.

Near the top of the cliff, he sat. He was winded, and he found it odd that no amount of walking these many days had seemed sufficient to build his endurance for the myriad climbs he was making along the coast. So he paused to catch his breath. He felt a twinge that he recognised as hunger, and he used the minutes of his respite to draw from his rucksack the last of a dried sausage he'd purchased when he'd come to a hamlet along his route. He gnawed it down to nothing, realised that he was also thirsty, and stood to see if anything resembling habitation was nearby: hamlet, fishing cottage, holiday home, or farm.

There was nothing. But thirst was good, he thought with resignation. Thirst was like the sharp stones pressing into the soles of his shoes, like the wind, like the rain. It reminded him, when reminders were needed.

He turned back to the sea. He saw that a lone surfer bobbed there, just beyond the breaking waves. At this time of year, the figure was entirely clothed in black neoprene. It was the only way to enjoy the frigid water.

He knew nothing about surfing, but he knew a fellow cenobite when he saw one. There was no religious meditation involved, but they were both alone in places where they should not have been alone. They were also both alone in conditions that were not suited for what they were attempting. For him, the coming rain—for there could be little doubt that rain was moments away from falling—would make his walk along the coast slippery and dangerous. For the surfer, the exposed reefs onshore demanded an answer to the question that asked why he surfed at all.

Careless in Red LP
A Novel. Copyright © by Elizabeth George. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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