Well-Schooled in Murder
94. Well-Schooled in Murder by Elizabeth George (Mystery) 414 p.
Thirteen-year-old Matthew Whateley goes missing from his independent boarding school and turns up dead in a churchyard an hour away, naked and with obvious signs of torture. The headmaster of Bredgar Chambers is reluctant to have the school involved in the investigation, but it soon becomes clear that he will have no choice: every piece of evidence leads straight back to the school. Too many of the students seem to be troubled, from a terrified third-year to the senior prefect, who is under more stress than mere grades and school responsibilities can account for, it is obvious that something deeply sinister is going on at Bredgar Chambers.
Another good but flawed Inspector Lynley mystery from Elizabeth George. I liked the plot of this one even better than that of A Great Deliverance, but there were several things that annoyed me during the course of the novel. George continues to be a little melodramatic when writing about some of her characters’ emotions, in a way that sometimes descends to the worst kind of sentimentalism.
The plot thread about Deborah St. James and her miscarriages was the worst offender; when Deborah weeps at seeing the mangled corpse of a dead bird in a churchyard, I knew nothing would be able to reconcile me to that particular plotline, and I was right. It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for women who are devastated by being unable to have children, but something about the way George writes it puts my back up. In much the same way, even when I mostly agree with the substance of Lynley’s moralizing, I still find it somehow particularly off-putting.
It was somewhat strange to go straight from A Great Deliverance, where Lynley is tragically in love with Deborah, who has just married his best friend, to Well-Schooled in Murder, where he is pining for Helen, to whom he has proposed and who has refused him before the story begins. Perhaps if I hadn’t skipped the intervening novel, Payment in Blood, the transition wouldn’t have been so abrupt. Still, it makes it hard to really care about Lynley’s feelings for Helen.
Going on about all the things I didn’t like makes the book sound like it has more faults than it does. I still think Elizabeth George writes some of the best and most entertaining police procedurals I’ve every read, and I’ll certainly look forward to reading some more of the Lynley mysteries.
Books read: 94/100 (94%)
Pages read: 28,323/30,000 (94%)
Tags: 50 Book Challenge 2007, Elizabeth George, Inspector Lynley
