Elena Weaver is a special person. Her father is a senior fellow and professor at St. Stephen's College and he almost is a certainty to win the Penford Chair of History. Because of being short listed for the promotion, he needs his daughter to behave. Elena is not behaving. She hasn't been applying herself to much except at enraging her father and her grades have been dropping, but right now she is enjoying her morning run. But, dear reader, not for long. As she pounds along the trail in the fog, she sees a person crouched down in the path before her. The fog makes it difficult to see. As she stops to help what looks like a person who has fallen, the dim morning light goes out. With a bone cracking crunch. Forever.

Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers are called in, but both officers are distracted. Lynley is pining for Lady Helen, who has had to move in with her sister's family temporarily. Her sister has had an emotional breakdown after her latest pregnancy. While the baby is healthy and adorable, Penelope and her husband Harry Rodger have had their relationship disturbed by the new infant. Taking care of three children, her husband and the house, having had to give up her job as an expert restorer of art, seems to have brought on a debilitating depression. Pen's decision to nurse her new infant despite her increasing realization she no longer can handle being the sole caretaker and only parent while her husband spends all of his time working away from their house, along with Harry's complete abnegation of his responsibilities as a father and husband, brought Helen to the house to help out. Helen is avoiding Lynley, who wants to marry her, so she finds her sister's difficulty a welcome diversion. However, Lynley is unable to stay away and is coming by to visit her. The Rodger house is in Cambridge, where the murder of Elena has taken place.

The breaking of hearts and relationships going on in the Rodgers house pales next to the devastation going on in Havers' house. Barbara's mother has Alzheimers and she needs constant care. Barbara is trying to keep her mother in her own house by hiring a neighbor lady to take care of her, but the elderly Mrs. Gustafson has no training or much common sense. There have been dreadful incidents. Barbara is so tired. She knows her mother is no longer safe in her own house. She does not want to make the decision to place Mum into an assisted living home.

Lynley and Havers are SO glad Elena was murdered!

Couldn't stomach the subject matter. Skipped it and went on to the next in the series.

Not bad however Havers has to be the most abrasive sidekick ever to have been written into a book.

Not too many redeeming characters in this but the description of the Cambridge Colleges is quite good. Lady Helen is just plain irritating and Lynley was a bit soppy in this tale.

While I can still get something out of any book by this author, this one also seriously bugged me. The reveal was inconsistent with earlier parts of the text. The motive for the crime was hard to swallow, as was the choice of victim given that motive. There was a section that seemed ripped from a romance novel, as I can only imagine a romance novel to be. That was enough to spoil the more interesting bits, of which there were many, as usual, in a lengthy book with copious red herrings.

Published in 1992, aspects of this work seemed as relevant today as they were 20 plus years ago. It was these aspects that caused me to rate this book a 4 rather than a 3. As enmeshed in the turbulence of 2016 politics as I am, several of the commentaries on human interactions in the last century struck home to the extent I wonder if we will every overcome what arguably must be the baser nature of humanity. Will sexism ever end? Will people continue to define each other by money and an arbitrarily assigned 'class'?

"Lady Helen continued to hold her. She tried to frame a question and wondered where to start and what she could ask that would not betray her growing anger. The fact that her rage was multi-directional served to make the act of concealing it only that much more difficult.

"She felt it first for Harry and for the needs of ego that would prompt a man to urge for the breeding of another child, as if what was being created were a demonstration of the father's virility, and not an individual with decided needs of its own. She felt it also for her sister and for the fact that she had given in to that sense of duty inbred in women from the beginning of time, a duty which told them that the possession of a functioning womb necessarily served as a definition of self."

"Lynley gave thought to Derek's words as he walked back to the south end of the island and ducked under the established police line. How often had he heard variations on that theme espoused religiously over the last few years? We've no class system any longer, it's dead and gone. It was always stated with well-meaning sincerity by someone whose career, whose background, or whose money effectively blinded him to the reality of life. While family trees whose roots plunged deeply into British soil, those without access to ready money or even the hope of saving a few pounds from their weekly pay, those were the people who recognized the insidious social strata of a society that claimed no strata existed at the very same moment as it labelled a man from the sound of his voice."

Lui non voleva ancora sentirsi felice. Gli pareva una condizione troppo effimera della vita.

I could have taken a star just for the sad feeling I get each time I finish reading one of these mysteries. But, I couldn't do it. Maybe when I get closer to the end of the series. Anyway, after the prequel interlude we return to the main timeline, where Lynley continues to pursue Lady Helen, having realized he is in love with her (duh!), although she is preoccupied with keeping her sister's family together as she (her sister Penelope, that is) is consumed with post-partum depression after the birth of her newest child. And Havers is trying to deal with her demented mother, in a storyline that hits very close to home for me right now. I can absolutely relate to the conflict Barbara feels, wondering if she is a terrible daughter for considering long-term care for her mother, ruminating on the nature of parent-child relationships, and feeling like a bad person generally. Oh yeah, and there's also a murder. Elena is brutally killed near her college in Cambridge, and as Lynley and Havers work to unravel the mystery, they encounter haughty university profs, fractured families, and misplaced lust, all thinly veiled by academic pursuit. The setting reminds me of Grantchester (in fact some of the story takes place in that village), or Lewis (Oxford), and I definitely enjoy wandering those rarefied alleyways in my mind. Elena is the deaf daughter of a high-ranking academic, and of course as the investigation unfolds, it is revealed that the victim has two faces (at least), and once again Lynley and Havers are at odds about the motive and, therefore, the perpetrator. George is skillful at throwing just enough red herrings in the reader's path to divert the attention from the truth, which is just how I like it. I can't wait to read the next installment, even as it brings me that much closer to the series' inevitable (and dreaded) conclusion.

This is probably my least favorite of the five books in this series I've read so far, it will still eke out 3 stars because it did keep my interest, I was just let down by the end. Much of these books are about the characters rather than the plot, but in this case the actual mystery plot ended up pretty weak. The motive for the first murder was not believable at all, and with the second murder, although the motive was clear, the fact that it occurred at all was just unnecessary, bordering on dumb.

Reading this one without reading the other books in the series was difficult. I didn't know any other characters and Lynley's relationship with Helen definitely makes it feel like I'm jumping in the middle of the story.
The mystery was good and difficult to predict, but the setting was difficult to understand - as a 27 year old dude from Kentucky. 90's England was tough to parse. What the hell is a gyp room anyway?