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20th out of 571 books
—
511 voters
For the Sake of Elena (Inspector Lynley #5)
Elena Weaver was a surprise to anyone meeting her for the first time. In her clingy dresses and dangling earrings she exuded a sexuality at odds with the innocence projected by the unicorn posters on her walls. While her embittered mother fretted about her welfare from her home in London, in Cambridge—where Elena was a student at St. Stephen's College—her father and his se...more
Hardcover, 388 pages
Published
1992
by Bantam
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(#5 in the Lynley-Havers Series)Elizabeth George does it again. A bunch of mini-stories rolled up into one. Elena is murdered. Lynley and Havers are brought in to investigate bringing in personal problems of their own. Helen is in Cambridge helping her sister (Penelope) take care of her kids. Lynley is trying to win Helen over. Havers is desperately trying not to feel guilty about having to put her mom in a home and she is doing everything she can to delay it. George does a wonderful job giving...more
5th book in the Inspector Lynley series
Elena was a student at St. Stephen's college, living a life of casual and intense physical and emotional relationships. One day while doing her morning run someone lying in wait along the route bludgeons her to death. The university turns to the New Scotland Yard, who assigns Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner detective Barbara Havers to solve the case. Entering the world of Cambridge University they sift through clues to Elena's elusive char...more
Elena was a student at St. Stephen's college, living a life of casual and intense physical and emotional relationships. One day while doing her morning run someone lying in wait along the route bludgeons her to death. The university turns to the New Scotland Yard, who assigns Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner detective Barbara Havers to solve the case. Entering the world of Cambridge University they sift through clues to Elena's elusive char...more
Fifth, publication-wise, and sixth, if you’re concerned with the chronology of the mystery series set in modern-day England, Inspector Lynley.
The Story
A vibrant, young life is brutally taken and Cambridge University requires Scotland Yard take over the investigation. The father, a history professor and candidate for the Penford Chair, is devastated for the loss of the daughter, Elena, he’s finally getting to know and for the overwhelming sense of guilt he feels for leaving her so many years ago...more
The Story
A vibrant, young life is brutally taken and Cambridge University requires Scotland Yard take over the investigation. The father, a history professor and candidate for the Penford Chair, is devastated for the loss of the daughter, Elena, he’s finally getting to know and for the overwhelming sense of guilt he feels for leaving her so many years ago...more
The plot is thus: Elena Weaver, a student of English at Cambridge, gets her face smashed in while out for her morning run. Scotland Yard is called in because of blah blah plot contrivance blah. Anyway, Elena was deaf, and this is a MAJOR DEAL TO LIKE, EVERYONE SHE KNEW. Her parents wouldn’t let her learn how to sign until she was in her teens because they wanted her to live a “normal” life, her friend from the campus Deaf Student Group gave her shit because she didn’t embrace Deaf culture as who...more
George continues to deliver. I'm now halfway to the book that started me on the journey to reading all of the Inspector Lynley mysteries (A Traitor to Memory). Her genius, to my mind, is her ability to combine a traditional 'whodunnit' with recurring characters in whom one becomes emotionally involved. Agatha Christie, by comparison, is heavily invested in the mystery itself, while her detectives (Poirot and Marple) remain something of a mystery to readers. Hard to imagine Poirot agonizing over...more
This book was all about sex. Whoever wasn't having it, was thinking about it.
I liked it, however, because it was also about love. It raised some of the big questions about possessiveness vs. giving in love. Shades of Busman's Honeymoon. But it raised them both in the context of relationships between lovers and also parent/child relationships. The problem with love is, you can't own someone no matter how much you may want to.
It was also a pretty good mystery. A young undergraduate is brutally mur...more
I liked it, however, because it was also about love. It raised some of the big questions about possessiveness vs. giving in love. Shades of Busman's Honeymoon. But it raised them both in the context of relationships between lovers and also parent/child relationships. The problem with love is, you can't own someone no matter how much you may want to.
It was also a pretty good mystery. A young undergraduate is brutally mur...more
I think this is the best Inspector Lynley installment yet. I've been re-reading the series from the beginning, and in each book, the main characters are drawn even more finely. George does a superb job of developing her characters subtly and consistently. In this fifth story, Lynley and Havers are called to Cambridge to aid the local police in the investigation of the murder of Elena Weaver, a university student. Elena, was the daughter of a professor who is a leading candidate for the prestigio...more
Whenever I read EG's books I find myself pondering the motives of the characters and attributing those thoughts towards similar situations in my own life. FTSOE is mostly about love and acceptance. The father and mother wanted their deaf daughter to function is a hearing world and rejected the Deaf community. The daughter felt unaccepted by her father and acted out in ways to embarrass him and make him pay for his conditional love. The father rejected his artist lover as a form of penance and re...more
A very slutty deaf girl is bludgeoned to death whilst jogging near her Cambridge college. Was the killer one of her lovers? Was it a misogynistic Shakespeare professor with an enormous penis? Was it her frigid, Stepfordesque stepmother? Will we have to explore the artistic feud between Whistler and Ruskin, and dissect much facile gibberish about art and the creative impulse before the unlikely murderer with even unlikelier motivations is revealed? Will we ponder the differences between middle-ag...more
Another well-written murder mystery, even if the motive revealed at the end is fraught with melodrama. At first I was indignant, certain the author had cheated me, but after re-reading an earlier chapter (I bet every reader will go back and revisit this chapter) I acknowledged an acceptable bit of cleverness.
The book is rather depressing, as it's full of people making themselves unhappy for various reasons. It's especially cynical about love and marriage, even as Lynley desperately pursues Helen...more
The book is rather depressing, as it's full of people making themselves unhappy for various reasons. It's especially cynical about love and marriage, even as Lynley desperately pursues Helen...more
Elizabeth George is an awesome writer of the literary British mystery. This is the sixth or seventh book in her Lynley series, and it's a good one. A college student is found dead, and the intrigue begins. George is a very literate author, and it's great as a reader to be treated to such great fiction. She's a great writer, period - she just happened to choose this genre.
I read What Came Before He Shot Her and Careless In Red a couple of years ago. My favorite of the two was WCBHSH, primarily because of the character development. EG did a brilliant job of bringing her characters to life and making me care about them. In CIR, she subsequently heightened my respect for her splendid ability to tell a story, and she interested me enough in the characters of Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers to want to read more about them. So, now about two years later, I decided to...more
I think this was the first of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley/Havers series I read. I've probably read eight or ten of her books since, whenever I saw one on the library shelf. I'd give them three and a half to four stars each. Her recurring characters are memorable, and all the more so for their flaws. The locales are usually noteworthy, the suspense nicely maintained throughout the book. The plots aren't predictable, either. Having said that, though, I stopped reading George when I picked...more
A student is attacked and killed whilst out for an early morning jog near her Cambridge University and Inspector Linley is asked to travel there to assist the police by special request in solving the crime. Her father is a highly respected member of staff in line for a chair and it transpires that his daughter, Elena, was deaf and dumb and a girl with some mystery surrounding her bahaviour. Barbara Havers has her own personal problems since the death of her father and is struggling with home hel...more
Elena, deaf daughter and student where her father is up for a history chair, is brutally beaten and strangled. Suspects are abundant but it is hard to pin the murder on any one of them. Her father abandoned his first wife, a bitter, manipulative, vengeful woman. Elena was a child. His guilt for leaving her is complicated by his pride, his eagerness that she not be seen as different yet he treats her as different. Relationships are key to solving the murder, but they are hard to ferret out. The r...more
I think this would have been the strongest Lynley mystery yet since the first, A Great Deliverance, were it not for one major flaw. While this didn't move me to tears as that first in the series did, this one feels all more of a piece than any of the prior George books. While in others the subplots concerning Havers' and Lynley's personal lives felt intrusive, in this one I feel for the first time since the first book George struck a good balance. Havers' dilemma with her mother, whose dementia...more
The Elizabeth George mysteries are amazingly complex, character studies. The most "likable" characters are shown to have flaws; the most unlikable characters are shown to have goodness.
So that's how Lynley and Lady Helen finally became a couple. Who knew art could drive people into insanity and back from the brink of it within the covers of the smae novel. Elizabeth George never leaves her characters without something to do in their lives and we careen along watching them, wishing we could offer them a cuppa, a shoulder to cry upon, and sometimes a good shaking. In the mantime, Lynley and Havers muddle through it all and like arrows pierce through to the heart of the mess and...more
What can I say? I love Inspector Lynley and Sergeant Havers. And the writing is excellent. There was more (sexual) information and language than I cared for in this one. I prefer more discreetness, but I know it was part of the story. The point of view and characters are amazing. Oh, there was an army of characters, at one point I thought I'd need a list to keep them straight, until the suspect list dwindled a bit :) And, of course, I didn't figure it out. Suspense right to the end, well nearly....more
This is the fifth of the series. They should really be read in order to avoid spoilers in the recurring character story arcs.
Il migliore
A oggi definirei questo libro il migliore della George.
Migliore come atmosfera, come personaggi, come trama poliziesca.
Davvero godibile:
una giovane studentessa uccisa brutalmente il mattino presto mentre fa jogging, un padre lanciato verso la nomina a professore luminare, una matrigna fredda e formale.
E vicende personali intrecciate e appassionanti, che riguardano anche gli ispettori stessi, gli immancabili e mai deludenti Linley e Havers.
Consiglio la George a tutti gli appassionati d...more
A oggi definirei questo libro il migliore della George.
Migliore come atmosfera, come personaggi, come trama poliziesca.
Davvero godibile:
una giovane studentessa uccisa brutalmente il mattino presto mentre fa jogging, un padre lanciato verso la nomina a professore luminare, una matrigna fredda e formale.
E vicende personali intrecciate e appassionanti, che riguardano anche gli ispettori stessi, gli immancabili e mai deludenti Linley e Havers.
Consiglio la George a tutti gli appassionati d...more
I found this Detective Lynley novel the best yet, but I attribue that in large part to my own maturity and the time of life that I am now in - I don't believe that this novel would have had the pull if I had read it a decade ago when it was published. By way of explaination, this novel delves quite deeply into philosophical explorations regarding relationships between men and women, age, love, and desire. Adroitly using the different perspectives of partners in 4-5 different relationships, the u...more
Elena, a deaf student, is killed while out running. Lynley gets called in as the college received bad press from a prior murder investigation by the local CID. The clues indicate the murder was done by someone who was aware that Elena ran every morning by the river and who was waiting for Elena.
The background story features Lynley's continuing to try to talk Helen into accepting his marriage proposal and Havers difficulty in accepting that the time has come to place her mom in assisted living....more
The background story features Lynley's continuing to try to talk Helen into accepting his marriage proposal and Havers difficulty in accepting that the time has come to place her mom in assisted living....more
This has been my least favorite of the series so far. In fact, I would go so far as to say it was almost a deal breaker for me. If the following book in the series is more like this that the earlier books I am afraid I will not be back for the next. There was way to much psychologizing and development of things that didn't relate to the mystery. I found myself often bored. The mystery itself was to easy to figure out, plus motive was implausible. Despite all the time spent developing characters...more
Elena Weaver, a bright but lazy college student at St. Stephen's College in Cambridge, turns up dead one morning. Her death unleashes a flurry of questions given her handicap, her tempestuous relationships with lovers and family, and her father's imminent nomination to the prestigious History Chair at the university. The more of her life is uncovered, the more suspects turn up, and the less any of it makes sense.
I really enjoy George's mysteries. I like the way she writes; the way things twist a...more
I really enjoy George's mysteries. I like the way she writes; the way things twist a...more
The 5th Inspector Lynley mystery was, for lake of a better word, a little to smutty for me. I've read the first four novels in the series and so I know Elizabeth George can be a bit graphic, but there was just to much in this novel for my tastes.
The other reason this is not a favorite Elizabeth George is because I did not care for the characters. The more I learned about the victim, the less I liked her. I found her manipulative, two faced attitude annoying. I understand that you are not necessa...more
The other reason this is not a favorite Elizabeth George is because I did not care for the characters. The more I learned about the victim, the less I liked her. I found her manipulative, two faced attitude annoying. I understand that you are not necessa...more
A chilling mystery that starts with a early morning jog on the path between Darwin College and Newnham in Cambridge, a path covered with grasses, meandering along the Cam river and draped in a misty shroud. The story moves between the life of the elite Cambridge students and their professors, where darkness reigns beneath the facade of 16th and 17th century colleges and the brilliant minds that live within the hallowed halls. An engrossing read,
This 5th book of the Inspector Lynley series is every bit as good as the previous books. The pattern continues - there is a murder, it takes most of the book to find out who did it, and in the meantime, we learn more and more about the main characters. Deborah wasn't in this book, and St. James only a little bit, but Havers and Lynley are there. A student at Cambridge is murdered while she is out running. All is not as it seems!
I still liked this, mostly because I love the characters of Inspector Lynley and his assistant Sergeant Barbara Havers, but it was my least favorite of the series so far. Elena, the murdered college student, draws Lynley and Havers into the complicated and secretive world of Cambridge. However, I didn't find the motive for the murder sufficient, and so the ending seemed a bit farfetched.
I liked this one - Havers & Lynley unravel a crime of passion while picking at issues in their own lives. It takes place in Cambridge and revolves around the murder of a young deaf student. Meanwhile Lynley's in a knot about Helen and Havers is trying to figure out what do to about her mother. The crime is interestingly complicated and the detectives grow as characters.
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| Goodreads Librari...: Book with wrong title | 2 | 142 | May 24, 2012 01:38pm |
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Susan Elizabeth George is an American author of mystery novels set in Great Britain. Eleven of her novels, featuring her character Inspector Lynley, have been adapted for television by the BBC as The Inspector Lynley Mysteries.
She was born in Warren, Ohio, but moved to the S...more
More about Elizabeth George...
Susan Elizabeth George is an American author of mystery novels set in Great Britain. Eleven of her novels, featuring her character Inspector Lynley, have been adapted for television by the BBC as The Inspector Lynley Mysteries.
She was born in Warren, Ohio, but moved to the S...more
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