Elizabeth George, For the Sake of Elena

[ellarien]

This is one of the Inspector Lynley mysteries. The Elena of the title is a Cambridge undergraduate, daughter of a professor with ambitions, who's murdered on her morning run; she was profoundly deaf, but not brought up in Deaf culture. Lynley and Havers are called in to investigate. There's a complicated web of relationships and possible motives to untangle, while Havers is distracted by her mother's slide into dementia and Lynley tries to revive his own relationship with Lady Helen, who's in Cambridge nursing a sister with a bad case of post-natal depression. The damp and cold of Cambridge in winter are vividly evoked, enough to feel chilly when I read it in Tucson in August, and the whole thing is depressing because there's hardly a contented life or a decently-functioning relationship to be seen; the flawed Lynley-Havers dynamic is about as good as it gets. (And I've never been able to understand what it was about Lady Helen, with her indecisiveness and self-doubt, that Lynley found so attractive.)


The final reveal of the murderer seemed like a cheat to me, though I suppose it's a time-honored one.