Careless in Red
Thank you Amazon for the picture
“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.”
Oh I am so excited I got a hand me down book! Careless in Red is a fabulous detective novel written by the talented Elizabeth George, like any decent detective novel you can’t keep a good detective down. George has put longtime series hero Detective Superintendent Thomas Lynley of New Scotland Yard through quite a bit lately; in her last novel, With No One as Witness, Lynley’s much-loved wife was shot to death on the street, reducing him to a grief-stricken shell and leading to his resignation from the Yard. How to resurrect him? George uses a pretty clunky deus ex machina device. Lynley has embarked on a walk along the coastal path in Cornwall; his rationale is that if he doesn’t keep moving, despair will overtake him. Sure enough, on day 43 of his walk, he spots, far below, what seems to his trained eye to be the vivid red and crumpled shape of a man who has plunged to his death. The machine creaks into place, with Lynley being treated as a suspect, then with grudging respect from the local, bumbling constabulary, and finally as someone his old associate Barbara Havers of New Scotland Yard seeks to restore to his post.
Fans of Barbara Havers may be disappointed that she doesn’t appear until partway through the novel, but she is always a treat to watch in action, and she doesn’t miss a beat in this one. Especially when she is working with Bea Hannaford, the two of them in a wicked variation of good cop/bad cop.
With the use of exotic names and locals of the Cornish countryside add a very rich flavor to the story. Another plus are the use of sports such as surfing and rock climbing. It’s an England that we’re familiar with, but not quite.
I have to say, Elizabeth George is back with this novel. There are plenty of details, an ingenious use of the color red, and the fraught relationships here are stretched so tight that they hum with tension. This is a real plus. Right up to the final pages the story keeps at a very tight pace and I found myself reading well into the night, wanting to know just what happens next.
Now go beg, borrow or steal… Well ok not steal but you get the idea. Go get a copy of your own.
Happy Reading
Sarah