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Latest From Whodunit Writer “Grabs Reader All The Way” BOOK NEWS
Elizabeth George proves to be a mystery writer with greater power than ever in her latest novel. “With No One as Witness” (Har-perCollins, $26.95) is 630 pages, and most mystery readers will tell you that’s far too long for a whodunit. But this one grabs the reader all the way. The plot con-cerns serial kill-ings in London. Many readers will accept a murderer who kills again to cover his tracks. But most of us don’t want to read about a serial killer who is mentally un-balanced and murders for blood lust. When George first lets the reader into the mind of the killer, he says he is “Fu, Creature Divine, eternal Deity of what must be.’’
This could be mind-numbing but it isn’t. As the book goes along, the reader joins the world of Scotland Yard and its people. This happens here more strongly than in previous books about Inspector Thomas Lynley and his closest subordinates, Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. In “With No One as Witness,’’ Lynley’s immediate boss is in the hospital and Lynley has been promoted with nobody to protect him and his staff from the idiocies of their superior, Assistant Commissioner Hillier. Hillier, who is worried about his public image, thinks he’ll control the press by using Nkata, who is black, as window-dressing at news conferences. He also brings in a profiler whom he allows to enter crime scenes, despite promising Lynley that he wouldn’t do so. Finally, he has a reporter embedded into the investigation. All this meddling is frustrating Lynley, who doesn’t know how to de-flect it, and it’s harming the investigation. At the end, something terrible happens to someone and it’s more disturbing than the reader — who has become the embedded person in these characters’ lives — might have expected.
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