Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14)

All Available Formats + Editions

——

$7.99

NOOK Book

——

$7.99

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) (eBook) Pub. Date: 3/17/2009 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
$0.99

$7.99

Paperback

$0.99

$7.99

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) (Mass Market Paperback - Reprint) Pub. Date: 4/28/2009 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

$1.99

$27.95

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) Pub. Date: 5/6/2008 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

$1.99

——

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) Pub. Date: 2/17/2009 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
$0.99

$26.89

Hardcover

$0.99

$26.89

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) Pub. Date: 5/6/2008 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
$1.08

$34.15

Audiobook

$1.08

$34.15

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) (CD) Pub. Date: 5/6/2008 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

$66.93

——

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14) (Cassette) Pub. Date: 1/1/2008 Publisher: Random House Audio Publishing Group

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

ADVERTISING

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

From Barnes & Noble

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

More Reviews (1) Fewer Reviews

From The Critics

George's novels about Scotland Yard's Thomas Lynley invariably have a long wind up before the action begins, so a narrator with the right tempo is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, Charles Keating lets the first few disks develop as quietly as the Cornwall countryside in which it is set. Keating reads the novel instead of performing it as he did with the previous Lynley mystery, What Came Before He Shot Her. While he reads carefully and clearly, he sounds a bit bored. It's a shame that the unabridged version narrated by John Lee from Books on Tape is not available through brick and mortar retailers (BOT, a branch of Random House, supplies libraries, schools and download sites with product); it is the superior version. A Harper hardcover (Reviews, Mar. 10).
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061160905
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 4/28/2009
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Edition description: Reprint
Pages: 752
Sales rank: 69,899
Series: Inspector Lynley Series, #14
Product dimensions: 4.20 (w) x 6.80 (h) x 1.90 (d)

Meet the Author

Elizabeth George

The reigning queen of the British mystery, it turns out, is an Ohio native living in Washington State. Best known for her Inspector Lynley series, Elizabeth George says that what drives her books is the psychological goings-on of her characters. She doesn't even mind, she says, if readers figure out the killer before the end -- the motive will always be a surprise.

Biography

Elizabeth George was happy that her first novel was rejected.

Scratch that. She's happy now. At the time, it wasn't her best day. But the notes from her editor helped her realize that she had written the wrong book and chosen the wrong leading man. She threw out her Agatha-Christie/drawing-room-whodunit model in favor of a more modern police procedural set in the world of Scotland Yard. She promoted a minor character to her leading man, the handsome, aristocratic, Bentley-driving Thomas Lynley. And she invented a partner for him, the blue-collar, foul-mouthed, messy Barbara Havers.

"I was very lucky when the first one was rejected, because the editor explained to me why," George told the Los Angeles Times in 1999. "I had written a very Agatha Christie-esque book and she said that wasn't the way it was done. The modern crime novel doesn't have the detective call everyone into the library. It must deal with more topical crimes and the motives must be more psychological because the things you kill for are different now. Things like getting rid of a spouse who won't divorce you, or hiding an illegitimate child, or blackmail over a family scandal -- those are no longer realistic motivations."

And so, in A Great Deliverance, her first published novel, she opens with the decapitated body of a farmer, his blood-splattered daughter holding an ax, the horrified clergyman who happens on to the crime scene, and a rat feasting on the remains. Nope, not in Agatha Christie territory anymore.

George began writing as child when her mother gave her an old 1939 typewriter. When she graduated from high school, she graduated to an electric typewriter. But not until she graduated to a home computer (purchased by her husband in the 1983), did she actually try her hand at a novel. At the time, she was a schoolteacher and had been since 1974. But with the computer in front of her, she has said, it was put-up-or-shut-up time. She finished her first manuscript in 1983. But her first book wasn't published for five more years.

Though the Lynley/Havers novels are set in England -- as are the tales in her first book of short stories, 2002's I, Richard -- George is a Yank, born in Ohio and raised in Southern California. Maintaining a flat in London's South Kensington as a home base for research, George has been an Anglophile since a trip as a teenager to the United Kingdom, where she ultimately found that a British setting better served the fiction that she wanted to write. "The English tradition offers the great tapestry novel," she told Publishers Weekly in 1996, "where you have the emotional aspect of a detective's personal life, the circumstances of the crime and, most important, the atmosphere of the English countryside that functions as another character."

Readers have made her books standard features on the bestseller lists, and critics have noted the psychologically deft motives of her characters and her detailed, well-researched plotting. "A behemoth, staggering in depth and breadth, A Traitor to Memory leaves you simultaneously satisfied and longing for more. It's simply a supreme pleasure to spend time engrossed in this intense, well-written novel," the Miami Herald said in 2001. The Washington Post called 1990's Well-Schooled in Murder " a bewitching book, exasperatingly clever, and with a complex plot that must be peeled layer by layer like an onion." The Los Angeles Times once called her "the California author who does Britain as well as P.D. James." And in 1996, Entertainment Weekly placed George's eighth novel, In the Presence of the Enemy in their fiction top ten list of the year, where she kept company with John Updike, Frank McCourt, Stephen King, and Jon Krakauer.

In her mind, each book begins with the killer, the victim and the motive. She travels to London and stays at her flat there to research locales. And she writes long profiles about what drives her characters psychologically. The kick for the reader isn't necessarily whodunit but why they dun it.

"I don't mind if they know who the killer is," she has said. "I'm happy to surprise them with the psychology behind the crime. I'm interested in the dark side of man. I'm interested in taboos, and murder is the greatest taboo. Characters are fascinating in their extremity not in their happiness."

Good To Know

The original model for Lynley was Nigel Havers, the nobleman and hurdle-jumper in the film Chariots of Fire whose butler placed champagne flutes on the hurdles to keep him from knocking them over. She named Barbara Havers as an homage to the actor.

On page 900 of the rough draft for Deception on His Mind, George changed her mind about the identity of the killer.

George's ex-husband is her business manager.

1. Hometown:
  
  Seattle, Washington
1. Date of Birth:
  
  February 26, 1949
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Warren, Ohio
1. Education:
  
  A.A. Foothill Community College, 1969; B.A. University of California, Riverside, 1970; M.S. California State University
2. Website:
  
  http://www.elizabethgeorgeonline.com

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.

Customer Reviews

Average Rating 3.5

( 59 )

Rating Distribution

( 14 )
( 13 )
( 12 )
( 16 )
( 4 )

If you've bought this product, tell the world how you liked it.

Write a Review

Anonymous

Posted October 31, 2008

George "jumps the shark!"

When a tv series "jumps the shark," one can conclude it is on the downhill slope toward oblivion. When Elizabeth George killed off Helen, her wonderful Thomas Lynley series became so doomed. The spark disappeared from Tommy's life and from the plots that made this reader eagerly await each new volume. Careless in Red drowns in a sea of details about characters whom I couldn't care about as it slogs through an investigation that never gets off the ground. Barbara Havers' entrance amounts to "too little, too late" and can't save the book either. George was my favorite author. I would like to think she will not overlook the other characters readers have come to know and love and bring them back to help Tommy to recover and us to care about her work once again.

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
REZ

Posted August 15, 2009

When there is nothing else to read

Very boring and cumbersome. Lacks movement. Pure drudgery. It would put a hospital patient to sleep.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted June 17, 2008

Careless In Red

Elizabeth George has redeemed herself - a little - with her latest book, Careless In Red. All that bad press about her previous book, What Came Before He Shot Her, must have pierced her through and through. That novel, a departure from her usual sex, crime and gore series, minus all the wonderful characters in the Lynley books, was a bad exercise in social commentary: Society, Bad Genes and Bad Upbringing leads to senseless shooting. But fans who remember George's early books wouldn't be too happy with the latest Lynley novel either. Oh yes, she brought back the dishy Lord Lynley - this time, unkempt, gaunt, dishevelled but with posh accent intact. He is hoping to get his wife (the 'her' who got shot) out of his system by tramping the coastlines of Cornwall where, lo and behold, the ex-New Scotland Yard homicide detective stumbles on a dead body. It's a gorgeous 18-year-old who fell from a cliff while abseiling. The back-story is George-esque. Tangled families, deceitful histories, lies and more lies. And plenty of sex of the adulterous and illicit kind. What it lacked was a videotape. So Thomas Lynley gets roped into the investigation by a middle-aged divorcee who runs the investigation show over there in Cornwall. And, of course, sh has a backstory too - a dishy ex-husband who happens to e a cop as well. The middle-aged love gone sour and turning sweet is really a lot more interesting than the spark George tries so hard to light between Lynley and an intriguingly named Daidre Trahair. In fact, he goes unprofessionally ga-ga gooey over this prime suspect, and poor dead Lady Helen Clyde (the 'her' who got shot) finds herself retreating further and further from his mind as he gets shaved, dressed and elegant again. So what is it that fans will not like? The crimes tory itself has shades of incest, adultery, illegitimate children, cuckoolded husband and mad mother - all the usual ingredients of a great Lynley book. But it won't be too far into the book before any intelligent reader realises who the murderer is and why the murder was committed. That delicious surprise element of who and why - always the most outrageous of all explanation - is gone. More than that, George tries to make the Trahair character exude a sort of mystery - and fails. Let's hope the failure was intentional and that this character will be kept out of the next Lynley instalment, or killed off in it. It's a good thinking, therefore, that George resurrects Lynley's sidekick, Sergeant Barbara Havers, and her cloud of cigarette smoke. Havers remains true to form: rough and tough outside but tender at the core. She saved this book.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted August 28, 2009

Not the best, but still good

Contrary to quite a few of the reviewers, I liked the book quite a lot. Perhaps I'm just fond of the characters - or more to the point, I like being surprised sometimes at outcomes. Too predictable is boring - and could be that our author also chooses not to be rote and consistent in her characters and plots. That's probably not a crime - although from some of the comments, you'd think so. (betrayed!! too little of one's favorite characters!! a favorite person written out!!)

a postscript: I just loved the below succinct comment (even though I don't agree with him/her). Rez, you slay me.

Posted August 15, 2009, 7:41 AM EST: Very boring and cumbersome. Lacks movement. Pure drudgery. It would put a hospital patient to sleep.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Dini

Posted June 29, 2009

George Always Comes Through!

I never hesitate to buy a novel by Elizabeth George. They are always woven together beautifully with much detail as to the surroundings of the action, the characters (many are elegant, especially Inspector Lynley), and the plot.

I find that the characters develop a bit further in each book so that you come to know them more intimately--like old friends and their problems evolve as time passes also.

Cannot say enough. Enjoy!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Jughead

Posted June 23, 2009

Muddled and lacking climatic outcomes!

Too bad, yet another disappointment from Ms. George. Perhaps she needs to get back to 400-page (max.) books that focus on several, and not too many, aspects. Seems Lynley should be 'primed' to show off his expertise!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Black_Cat_Lover

Posted June 21, 2009

more from this reviewer

Way Off Her Game

I've read a number of George's books (including the 2 before this) and have generally been happy with them. However, she's way off her game here. Nothing happened for the first 300 pages. Way too many characters that never amounted to anything in the story. And as others have said, for Lynley to go from wandering the Cornish coast in misery and displair to an upbeat interest in a murder and a wierd relationship with a gypsy turned vet is way beyond fiction.
The ending might have been interesting if she had built it up more. And she threw in a plot twist of "age advancing" some kids' pictures but never tied that loop.
Very disappointing.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted May 24, 2009

Elizabeth George does not disappoint.

I have read and enjoyed all of the Inspector Lynley novels and have loved every one.

After ordering this book I read a very unfavorable review and did not expect to enjoy it. Well the review was sooo wrong. It was great!!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Dr-Bee

Posted March 20, 2009

Very Disappointed

I have loved Elizabeth George's writing for years; however, a few of her most recent books have been disappointing. With the most recent, she is no longer on the top of my list of favorite authors. I found this book to be tedious, uninteresting, and too densely worded. I didn't care about the characters, including Lynly and Havers (they were minor players)and, I fear, I have lost the will to keep in touch with them. It just took too much effort to trudge to the end of this book. The resolution was very anticlimactic and the whole female-vet-as-abandoned-gypsy-thing, beyond reality. As I read (and I only kept reading because I kept thinking that if I went on, at some point it would be worth it), it occurred to me that perhaps Miss George wrote this book in an effort to use every descriptive word, plot line, character, metaphor and simile she had ever had in mind in order to dazzle of us with her literary prowess. And yet, somehow, I feel as though I just tried to enjoy a lemon popcicle with the wrapper in tact - very unsatisfying.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted September 14, 2008

Wandering

I felt like I was the one plowing along the rocky coasts. Two very tedious books in a row. Sadly, Elizabeth George is off my 'A' list

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted August 2, 2008

Diappointing and Way Too Long

I could not wait for this book to come out and what a bust. One minute Lynley is mourning the loss of Helen,'not eating, sleeping, walking etc.'the next minute he has sunk himself into a murder mystery and going ga ga over the vet. There were too many characters that I did not care about and really did not even make me think they were suspects.The investigation never really took off and the clues were weak. I figured this one out way before the ending. Did we really need to know that Bea did internet dating? It really wasn't necessary to wrap up the stories on all those people and their dysfunctional lives. All I want as a big fan is the stuff we love, Tommy,Barbara and the rest of the gang.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted August 4, 2008

Not one of my favorite Elizabeth George mysteries

I had trouble following the characters in this book. I've read all of Ms. George's books, especially like Inspector Lynley books, but this one disappointed me somewhat. I had to keep looking back to see who was who.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted June 22, 2008

Such a Disapointment

I actually enjoyed 'What Came Before He Shot Her' quite a bit. Her characters can be a be overwrought, but they usually ring true in the end. 'Careless In Red' has our well known and well loved Lynley acting so unlike himself - it is as if the novel were written as fanfiction by the mysterious vet from Bristol. He ignores every calculated lie and omission - apparantly because he is constantly thinking about brushing her damn hair out of her face. Do we really need 5 scenes of her wayward tresses?

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted June 18, 2008

Two thumbs down

Ugh! This book was so disappointing. I dutifully trudged through hoping it would redeem itself in the end, but, alas, it did not. The ending fell very flat. It felt as though most of the characters just disappeared off the pages with little or no resolution. I wish Elizabeth George would write more novels like her previous one, 'What Came Before He Shot Her'. That was fabulous!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted June 17, 2008

I usually like George's books, but...

there are so many better ways to spend your time than reading this one, including petting your dog 'or cat, if the cat's willing', washing your car, walking, or even staring mindlessly into the distance. This book is a huge disappointment, and at over 600 pages, it's disappointing for a long time. George desperately needs an editor who will reign her in. Can we dispense with the in-depth reporting of every turn a car makes every time a character gets in one? Do even the most minor of characters have to be described from birth on? The length of the novel would have been acceptable if there were any sort of pay-off in the end. Alas, if you choose to read it, don't get your hopes up. It doesn't so much wrap up as simply end. Yes, George reveals the killer's identity, but it's astonishingly unbelievable. To reinforce my point about the need for more editing, let me say that the novel goes on for some 30 or 40 pages after the killer is revealed. So that George can pull some trick out of her hat that explains the unbelievability of the killer's identity? No, not at all. There's nothing more there.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted June 21, 2008

Not worth the time

I was really disappointed by this long awaited tale of Thomas Linley's life. I agree with others that the book sort of just ended as if she had grown tired of writing it. I have long been a major fan of George's writing and hope that the next installment of the Linley series will be more in line with the excellent writing for which it is known.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted May 27, 2008

Needs a hard-headed editor

The good news is that Lynley and Havers are back. The bad news is that they are mired in 623 pages of bloated, portentous prose and almost obliterated by numerous subplots. The subplots, all involving unlovable characters with unfamiliar (presumably Cornish) names, unfold in disconnected fragments, each revelation ending in a teaser about dark-doings-in-the-past. The past situation that I really wanted updated, the relationship between Havers and her south Asian neighbors, wasn't mentioned at all.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted July 14, 2008

Too out of character....

I was disappointed in this book....I found it too out of character for both Lynley and Barbara. Inspector Lynley wasn't the objective professional he usually is and the lack of interaction with Barbara where they share their ideas and thoughts in order to process the motives of the suspects was gone. The whole idea that he could be forced to participate in the investigation was just too unbelievable.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Anonymous

Posted May 19, 2008

Not up to Snuff

I eagerly looked forward to discovering what George would do following the non-Lynley novel. I found Careless in Red tedious--too many characters, too many red herrings. I did enjoy the interaction between Lynley and Havers and hope that George's next novel concentrates on the pair.

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
Possomholler

Posted January 5, 2012

Bad Purchase

This is the first book I have read by this author. I found it very hard to follow as it kept jumping from one thing to another. I don't plan to read anymore of her books.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.

If you find inappropriate content, please report it to Barnes & Noble

Careless in Red (Inspector Lynley Series #14)

Pick Up in Store

Available on NOOK devices and apps

All Available Formats + Editions

Customers Who Bought This Also Bought

More About This Book

Overview

Editorial Reviews

From Barnes & Noble

Patrick Anderson

From The Critics

Product Details

Meet the Author

Elizabeth George

Biography

Good To Know

Read an Excerpt

Rating Distribution

George "jumps the shark!"

When there is nothing else to read

Careless In Red

Not the best, but still good

George Always Comes Through!

Muddled and lacking climatic outcomes!

Way Off Her Game

Elizabeth George does not disappoint.

Very Disappointed

Wandering

Diappointing and Way Too Long

Not one of my favorite Elizabeth George mysteries

Such a Disapointment

Two thumbs down

I usually like George's books, but...

Not worth the time

Needs a hard-headed editor

Too out of character....

Not up to Snuff

Bad Purchase