A Traitor to Memory
by Elizabeth George
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Book Summary Information
Author: Elizabeth GeorgeEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2002-08-27
ISBN: 0553582364
Number of pages: 1024
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of A Traitor to Memory
Book Review: Good writing but slow and painful story
Summary: 3 Stars
This is my first book by Elizabeth George. The sheer size made it a daunting task to finish. The language flows smoothly. I could turn page after page with no problem. Some chapters are written in first person singular (I) while others are from the point of view of different characters.
Let me try to remember how many characters are there. Gideon, Pitchford (who has changed his name twice before), Katja, Sarah Jane, Eugenie, Richard, Jill, Webberly, Libby, Lynly, Yasmin, McKay, another attorney (I just completed the book and I don't remember few names), Malcolm, Frances, Winston Nkata, Cecilia, Katie Waddington, a prison guard, Hillier, Deborah, Helen. If the character doesn't hang around in my mind the characterization is poor. While Gideon's character was interesting to begin with I got bored by his self-centeredness and ranting. All the time he seems to confront his father Richard `you lied to me,' and `I knew it' - page after page.
Some chapters are written from the point of view of minor characters. Like in one chapter there is a whole back story of Pitchford and in another that of Winston Nkata. The point of view changes too often and few times I had to go back to realize `who is thinking this?'
It was confused how characters change from being heterosexual to homosexual. For, Katja Wolfe obviously had sex with a man to give birth to a son and then she is shown to be lesbian. Yasmin was married to a man and has a son but now she is lesbian.
I was also upset because I didn't see the point of showing another deformed child - Victoria. To me, it achieved nothing.
Usually when I read a murder mystery I start guessing who could be the murderer. In this novel I didn't even try because I didn't care who the murderer was. I always wondered why the victim of a hit and run invariably runs in front of the car, rather than running sideways. Richard being pushed in front of a bus and having minor fracture didn't sound authentic. Who can take the risk of falling in front of a bus in a calculated way that one can only get a minor fracture.
Demanding money to admit murder and go to prison for twenty years? It didn't convince me. It is human to value freedom more than a paid jail sentence.
In short, too many characters and they have long back stories. New characters emerge up to the end of the novel (Noreen McKay). The time frame during which all events occur is confusing. I had some sympathy for Libby's character but disliked all others. Since there are characters who has no connection to the main plot the story gets diluted. There are loose ends left. The end didn't impress me.
About the craft, I already mentioned the change of point of view not only in a scene but even in a single paragraph. She uses adverbs and dilutes the strength of the prose. She also uses verb qualifiers (Richard said heavily, Richard countered, Jill pleaded). The book also has long paragraphs in dialogs, some more than half a page. I also noticed two exclamation marks.
Since I had great expectations from Elizabeth George because I had heard so much about this great writer, at the end of the book I had disappointment.
To her credit though, there are some great sentences and paragraphs and beats in the dialogue. And above all I could finish the book of over a thousand pages. And I give her credit for that.
I don't think this book has ever been edited.
Will I read any of her books again? Yes, I'll give her one more chance because her language flows smoothly.
Summary of A Traitor to Memory
When Eugenie Davies is killed by a driver on a quiet London street, her death is clearly no accident. Someone struck her with a car and then deliberately ran over her body before driving off, leaving nothing behind but questions.What brought Eugenie Davies to London on a rainy autumn night? Why was she carrying the name of the man who found her body? Who among the many acquaintances in her complicated and tragic life could have wanted her dead? And could her murder have some connection to a twenty-eight-year-old musical wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist who several months earlier suddenly and inexplicably lost the ability to play a single note?
For Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, whose own domestic life is about to change radically, these questions are only the first in an investigation that leads him to walk a fine line between personal loyalty and professional honor.
Assigned to the case by his superior, Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Lynley learns that Webberly's first murder investigation as a DI over twenty years ago involved Eugenie Davies and a sensational criminal trial. Yet what is truly damaging is what Webberly already knows and no doubt wants Lynley to keep concealed.
Now the pressure is on Lynley to find Eugenie Davies' killer. For not only is he putting his own career into jeopardy, but he is also attempting to safeguard the careers of his longtime partners Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. Together, they must untangle the dark secrets and darker passions of a family whose history conceals the truth behind a horrific crime.
From the Hardcover edition.
Families can be monstrous and their secrets dangerous, as New Scotland Yard detectives Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers have discovered. The pair are puzzled that the Hampstead police need their help investigating the vehicular murder of a middle-aged divorcée, until they find evidence that one of their own superiors once knew the dead lady very well indeed. But the circumstances of Eugenie Davies's murder appear to center on her children: Gideon, a famous violinist now undergoing psychoanalysis for his sudden inability to play, and the long-dead Sonia, a disabled baby whose drowning death was shrouded in secrecy for her virtuoso brother's sake--at the insistence of their father, Richard--but also trumpeted in the press as the infamous "nanny murder" of its day. The nanny, Katja Wolff, has recently been released from prison, having never spoken of the night Sonia drowned. Lynley, Havers, and their colleague Winston Nkata know that whatever secret Katja Wolff has been hiding must be the cause of Eugenie Davies's death, but before they can find out what it is, another deliberate hit-and-run occurs in their own backyard.
The suspects are many: Wolff; Eugenie's most recent suitor; her ne'er-do-well brother; Gideon's longtime mentor, who kept in contact with Eugenie in the years after she abandoned her husband and son; and a gentleman of many monikers who boarded with the family at the time of the drowning. Even Richard Davies, the dead woman's ex-husband, is under suspicion. But it's violinist Gideon Davies's quest into his family's past, undertaken to save his career, that sets the book's events in motion. His own telling of the story runs parallel to the author's own voice but is time-shifted. Along with the details of the police investigation, this paints a disturbing picture of what happens when the truth is obscured and a child's normal instincts sublimated.
A Traitor to Memory is massive, and it's hard not to spot a few flaws in a plot so complex. The dual narratives force abnormally slow reading, the motive for one murder and two near-murders is inexplicably glossed over, and many doughty Lynley/Havers fans will still wonder by the end what exactly happened in Sonia's bathroom. Yet Elizabeth George orchestrates the family-secrets theme like a maestro, and at least one of the second-chair players--such as Katja Wolff's beautiful, scarred lover Yasmine Edwards--may be a rising star in the series. George's fans will no doubt find this 11th entry in the series worthy of a standing ovation. --Barrie Trinkle
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