They were at the table, with the items from Joy Sinclair's shoulder bag spread out before them. The tape recorder was playing yet another time, Joy's voice rising and falling with the broken messages that Barbara had long ago memorised. Hearing it now, she realised that the recording had begun to take on the quality of a recurring nightmare, and Lynley the quality of a man obsessed. His were not quantum leaps of intuition in which the misty image of crime-motive-perpetrator took recognizable shape. Rather, they bore the appearance of contrivance, of an attempt to find and assess guilt where only by the wildest stretching of the imagination could it possibly exist. For the first time in that endless harrowing day, Barbara began to feel uneasy. In the long months of their partnership, she had come to realise that, for all his exterior gloss and sophistication, for all his trappings of upper-class splendour that she so mightily despised, Lynley was still the finest DI she had ever worked with. Yet Barbara knew intuitively that the case he was building now was wrong, founded on sand. She sat down and reached restlessly for the book of matches from Joy Sinclair's bag, brooding upon it.
-Payment in Blood
It's interesting reading the Lynley books having already made my way through a substantial part of the television series. I've been enjoying the show quite a lot, which means that I've come into the books with fairly high expectations. In the case of Payment in Blood, the story wasn't quite as engaging as I would have hoped.
In Payment in Blood, Lynley and Havers are assigned to a case in Scotland, quite a bit outside the usual purview of the Metropolitan Police. A playwright has been murdered while on retreat with the cast about to stage a production of her latest work; circumstances indicate that she was almost certainly killed by one of them. Among the guests of the house, to Lynley's dismay, is his great friend Lady Helen Clyde, invited to stay by the play's director. While Helen is never a suspect, her presence wreaks havoc on Lynley's detective work, as his newly awoken jealousy provokes him to narrow his field of suspects far too hastily. As Havers notes in the excerpt above, he's not seeing the case clearly, but unfortunately her objections to his line of inquiry fall on deaf ears.
As George tells the story, it becomes more and more convoluted, involving a large pool of suspects that even I, having already seen the televised adaptation, had trouble keeping track of. The story goes on to encompass a 15-year-old case of suicide and involvement from MI-5--one of which, perhaps, would have been enough to keep the reader guessing, as there were already plenty of motives to pick from. (The television adaptation streamlined the case substantially, and neither subplot was used.)
The trouble with having so much plot and so many characters, I found, was that I felt I didn't get to spend much time getting to know either Lynley or Havers any better. I like both characters enough that I felt rather disappointed to be taken away from their inner thoughts so often. I'm still interested in continuing to read the series, so I'm hoping this was more of an aberration than a trend for future stories.
Up next: Already pretty far into Furious Love, a juicy account of the love affair between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
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