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THE CRIMINAL ELEMENT.
The opening pages of For the Sake of Elena testify to Elizabeth George's control of plot and style. Briskly, George depicts the morning routine of Cambridge undergraduate Elena Weaver, soon to be a murder victim. Some particulars are mundane (tooth brushing, clothing choices); some are rather sweet (Elena's interactions with her pet mouse). All serve to enlist interest and sympathy so that the hook that closes the first section, "she had less than fifteen minutes to live," falls as sharply as a blow on the reader's consciousness.
Moreover, those details resonate throughout the novel. Instead of dimming a bit as other events occur, this passage intensifies because, in retrospect, various particulars spring affirmingly to mind as George reveals elements of Elena's personality. One thinks, "Of course! I noticed that but didn't realize the significance." This device so vivifies Elena that she remains a developing character throughout the: novel.
Suspects soon proliferate: the artist who discovers the body; Elena's lovers and would-be lovers; her divorced parents, whose guilt and anger corrode their relationships with their daughter, a stepmother, whose husband overrides her in favor of Elena. In delineating these characters, George distinguishes usefully between selfishness and self-definition, a lesson as important to her continuing characters as to the others.
As is traditional in police procedurals, the private lives of Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Lord Asherton, and of his working-class partner at New Scotland Yard, Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, frame the main plot. Here, Lynley pursues his courtship of Lady Helen Clyde, and Havers faces increasing difficulty in caring for her demented mother. Like almost every other major character, the investigators must evaluate their motives. Such introspection can damage the pace, but except for a few overlong moments of soul searching, George manages it well. Suspenseful, literate but readily accessible to a wide range of readers, thoughtful and thought provoking, For the Sake of Elena is an elegant novel.
Wendy Hornsby's Telling Lies, a worthy successor to the admirable Half a Mind and No Harm, also combines mystery and social commentary. Maggie MacGowen, an investigative filmmaker, applies finely honed job skills to solve the attempted murder of her...