Playing for the Ashes
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: 1995-08-01
ISBN: 0553572512
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Bantam
Book Reviews of Playing for the Ashes
Book Review: A taste for misery
Summary: 1 Stars
After watching and enjoying the Inspector Lynley series on PBS, I broke one of my firm rules for such situations and bought two of the books without first checking them out of the library to see if they were as good or better than the movie/TV version. I found them tedious and meandering. However, I knew that Elizabeth George has many enthusiastic fans among book critics and the reading public, so when I saw Playing for the Ashes at an extremely cheap price, I thought that maybe I had been unlucky in my first two choices, and bought it. Ugh! It was fully as bad as the most critical reviewers have said. It is very long-winded. Ms.George rarely makes a point in one paragraph when she can drag it out for a page or two. The emotional problems of the principal characters are explored in excessive and repetitious detail. The worst example( though there are many others, including Lynley and Havers themselves ) is Olivia Whitelaw. Long stretches of the book (very, very long stretches) are spent detailing her present and past problems, psychological and physical. We are obviously meant to feel empathy and pity for her, but she is such a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work that this is impossible, and this insistence grows from irritating to downright annoying. There is a pretentiousness about this author's works which is grating. It is as if she feels the need, every few pages, to say to the reader "Look! I'm not just a mystery writer, I'm a novelist." I'm not arguing that an author cannot write a good, satisfying mystery which also includes shrewd and illuminating observations on people and society, or that a "whodunnit" has to be short and shallow, but rather that the characters and situations should contribute to the story and illuminate it. All the best mysteries do precisely that, which is why we can reread them many times with enjoyment even though we know the who, how, and why of the murders. Too often, Elizabeth George's do not. She seems to wallow in misery, to relish it for it's own sake. She strives hard, too hard, to be "deep", and so she fails to be. The Inspector Lynley series is one of those rarities in which a TV version is far better than the books from which it was adapted.
Summary of Playing for the Ashes
"The story begins with my father, actually, and the fact that I'm the one who's answerable for his death. It was not my first crime, as you will see, but it is the one my mother couldn't forgive."In her astonishing New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Elizabeth George reveals the even darker truth behind this startling confession. Playing for the Ashes is a rich tale of passion, murder and love in which Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers once again
find themselves embroiled in a case where nothing--and no one--is really what it seems. Intense, suspenseful and brilliantly written, Playing for the
Ashes will make readers "search out the sleuthing pair's first six adventures...a treasure," as Cosmopolitan predicted in their review.
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