This is the only book of the Inspector Lynley series which I have read; I'm giving the series the benefit of the doubt and may try again from the beginning, but I found this book rather unsatisfying. I was looking for a mystery in the tradition of Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot; a series of seemingly unconnected events and clues to a dastardly deed which the investigator has to piece together and, in a brilliant flash of deduction, ties them altogether and catches the killer. I thought that with the addition of a second murder twenty years earlier, the reveal would be particularly satisfying.

That's not what happened. For one thing, the investigator didn't seem to uncover any meaningful clues. Most of what he was investigating were red herrings. The one clue that I recall pointing him in the direction of the murder was a bit of rather pedestrian computer investigation -- search a database for all high end black cars connected to the murder victim.

As for the twenty-year-old murder, most of that was solved, not by the investigator, but through the psychotherapeutic journals of the murder victims' brother and son. Not only that, but the conclusion of that mystery was rather expected. Shortly after the journals revealed that the young man had altogether repressed most of his memories of his younger, murdered, sister, I remember thinking, "he'd better not end up having killed his sister with his parents covering up the murder by paying off the East German refugee. That would be too obvious."

(That's not a spoiler, because I didn't tell you whether or not that's the way the book ended up, I just told you my prediction from when I was reading the book.)