Elizabeth George
BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
- Title: A Place Of Hiding
- Description:
The sudden death of Guy Brouard after his morning swim shocks the residents of Guernsey. Brouard has been a generous patron and benefactor of the island since his arrival there a decade ago, and his demise puts a question mark over many cherished projects.
When a young American woman is charged with the murder, her brother seeks help from the only contact he has in the UK - Deborah St. James. Deborah is horrified to find that her old friend has been arrested and persuades her husband Simon to accompany her to Guernsey to avert this miscarriage of justice.
What they find on that beautiful island is a tangled web of deceit and betrayal, with its origins in wartime occupation. In solving the crine, they must rely on their long-standing friendship with Inspector Thomas Lynley; they must also learn painful lessons about loyalty and trust, and the loving tyranny of family ties. 
- Title: Well Schooled In Murder
- Description:
The discovery of a schoolboy's body in a country churchyard shatters the quiet, confident atmosphere of Bredgar Chambers School.. Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers investigate the chilling mystery at the old and distinguished public school where honour and loyalty are watchwords - or are they.?
Who murdered the brilliant boy, and why.? How did his body get from the school to a distant churchyard.? Why had he lied about where he was going on his exeat.? As Lynley and Havers question both the staff and the pupils of Bredgar Chambers, they sense something extraordinary and evil that has been locked away for several years within the confines of this privileged community... 
- Title: For The Sake Of Elena
- Description:
thick paperback 
- Title: In Pursuit Of The Proper Sinner
- Description:
Award winning novelist Elizabeth George (A Great Deliverance, Well-Schooled in Murder) returns with In Pursuit of a Proper Sinner, her 10th instalment in the Lynley-Havers series. Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley has his work cut out for him: two mutilated corpses are found in a prehistoric stone circle in Derbyshire. One is the daughter of Lynley's former mentor Andy Maiden. What's more, the Inspector's partner Barbara Havers has been suspended and is facing criminal charges of assault and attempted murder. Was Havers really saving a drowning child or was she disobeying orders? Why then did she fire a rifle at the Detective Chief Inspector and how could Lynley ethically justify it? As he grapples with the ramifications of his partner's radical insubordination, the case in Derbyshire grows in daunting complexity. Once again, Elizabeth George delivers an intricately woven plot which efficiently navigates the reader through the book's 566 pages. Along the way, readers will be introduced to a delightful cast of supporting characters, from the dowdy Phoebe who finds the first gory cadaver to the stately Andy Maiden: "His face was drawn with exhaustion, and his growth of peppery whiskers fanned out from his moustache and shadowed his cheeks". And, of course, fans will get an eyeful of George's trademark; her vivid descriptions of death: "At her feet, a young man lay curled like a foetus, dressed head-to-toe in nothing but black, with that same colour puckering burnt flesh from eye to jaw on one side of his face". --Rebekah Warren 
- Title: With No One As Witness
- Description:
When the Metropolitan Police fail to realise a serial killer is at work, London ignites over the fact that the killer's victims are young black and mixed race boys. Institutionalised racism is claimed by the community's activists and tabloids alike. Acting Superintendent Thomas Lynley is given the case, and his Scotland Yard task force is soon handling more killings and a looming tragedy. Elizabeth George brings to the familiar subject of the serial killer a freshness and clarity of vision that provide illuminating insight into the psychological complexity of the tortured criminal mind. She does so within a richly textured, thrillingly suspenseful narrative that defies any reader to predict its outcome. Nor does she neglect our favourite characters, whose private lives provide an engrossing counterpoint to their professional duties. 
- Title: Payment In Blood (inspector Lynley Mystery)
- Description:
An isolated Scottish mansion is the venue for a reading of a controversial new play by a West End theatre company. But on the very first evening, the playwright is savagely murdered, and Inspector Thomas Lynley faces the most testing case of his career. For one of the suspects is Lady Helen Clyde, the woman Lynley loves. And as he attempts to untangle the family scandals, fierce theatrical rivalries and long-buried secrets that beset the case, Lynley struggles to balance the clinical detachment of his job with the intensity of his feelings. About the Author Elizabeth George is the author of highly acclaimed novels of psychological suspense. Her first novel, A Great Deliverance, was honoured with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards in America and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France; Well-Schooled in Murder was awarded the prestigious German prize for international mystery fiction, the MIMI (1990). Her novels have now been adapted for television by the BBC. An Edgar and Macavity Nominee as well as a New York Times and international bestselling author, Elizabeth George divides her time between California and Kensington, London. 
- Title: Well Schooled In Murder
- Description:
The discovery of a schoolboy's body in a country churchyard shatters the quiet, confident atmosphere of Bredgar Chambers School. Who murdered the brilliant boy, and why? How did his body get from the school to a distant churchyard? About the Author Elizabeth George is the author of highly acclaimed novels of psychological suspense. Her first novel, A Great Deliverance, was honoured with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards in America and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France; Well-Schooled in Murder was awarded the prestigious German prize for international mystery fiction, the MIMI (1990). Her novels have now been adapted for television by the BBC. An Edgar and Macavity Nominee as well as a New York Times and international bestselling author, Elizabeth George divides her time between California and Kensington, London. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. 
- Title: A Traitor To Memory
- Description:
Virtuoso violinist Gideon Davies has lost his memory of music and his ability to play the instrument he mastered at the age of five. One fateful night at Wigmore Hall, he lifted his violin to play in a Beethoven trio...and everything in his mind related to music was gone. Gideon suffers from a form of amnesia, the cure for which is an examination of what he can remember. And what he can remember is little enough until his mind is triggered by the weeping of a woman and a single name: Sonia. One rainy evening, a woman called Eugenie travels to London for a mysterious appointment. But before she is able to reach her destination, a car swoops out of nowhere and kills her in the street. In pursuing her killer, Thomas Lynley, Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata come to know a group of people inextricably connected by a long-ago crime and punishment no one has spoken of for twenty years. About the Author Elizabeth George is the author of highly acclaimed novels of psychological suspense. Her first novel, A Great Deliverance, was honoured with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards in America and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France; Well-Schooled in Murder was awarded the prestigious German prize for international mystery fiction, the MIMI (1990). Her novels have now been adapted for television by the BBC. An Edgar and Macavity Nominee as well as a New York Times and international bestselling author, Elizabeth George divides her time between California and Kensington, London. Excerpted from A Traitor to Memory by Elizabeth George. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved Maida Vale, London Fat girls can do. Fat girls can do. Fat girls can do and do and do. As she trod the pavement towards her car, Katie Waddington used her regular mantra in rhythm with her lumbering pace. She said the words mentally instead of aloud, not so much because she was alone and afraid of seeming batty but rather because to say them aloud would put further demands on her labouring lungs. And they had trouble enough to keep going. As did her heart which, according to her always sententious GP, was not intended to pump blood through arteries that were being fast encroached upon by fat. When he looked at her, he saw rolls of flesh, he saw mammae hanging like two heavy flour sacks from her shoulders, he saw a stomach that drooped to cover her pubis and skin that was cratered with cellulite. She was carrying so much weight on her frame that she could live for a year on her own tissue without eating and, if the doctor was to be believed, the fat was moving in on her vital organs. If she didn't do something to curb herself at table, he declared each time she saw him, she was going to be a goner. `Heart failure or stroke, Kathleen,' he told her with a shake of his head. `Choose your poison. Your condition calls for immediate action, and that action is not intended to include ingesting anything that can turn into adipose tissue. Do you understand?' How could she not? It was her body they were talking about and one couldn't be the size of a hippo in a business suit without noticing that fact when the opportunity arose to have a glimpse at one's reflection. But the truth of the matter was that her GP was the only person in Katie's life who had difficulty accepting her as the terminally fat girl she'd been from childhood. And since the people who counted took her as she was, she had no motivation to shed the thirteen stone that her doctor was recommending. If Katie had ever harboured a doubt about being embraced by a world of people who were increasingly buffed, toned, and sculpted, she'd had her worth reaffirmed tonight as it was every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday when her Eros in Action groups met from seven till ten o'clock. There, the sexually dysfunctional populace of Greater London came together for solace and solution. Directed by Katie Waddington -- who'd made the study of human sexuality her lifelong passion -- libidos were examined; erotomania and-phobia were dissected; frigidity, nymphomania, satyrism, transvestism, and fetishisms were admitted to; erotic fantasies were encouraged; and erotic imagination was stimulated. `You saved our marriage,' her clients gushed. Or their lives, or their sanity, or frequently their careers. Sex is profit was Katie's motto, and she had nearly twenty years of approximately six thousand grateful clients and a waiting list of two hundred more to prove this true. So she walked to her car in a state that was somewhere between self-satisfaction and absolute rapture. She might be inorgasmic herself, but who was to know as long as she had success in consistently promoting happy orgasm in others? And that's what the public wanted, after all: guilt-free sexual release upon demand. Who guided them to it? A fat girl did. Who absolved them of the shame of their desires? A fat girl did. Who taught them everything from stimulating erogenous zones to simulating passion till passion returned? A terminally hugely preposterously fat girl from Canterbury did and did and did. That was more important than counting calories. If Katie Waddington was meant to die fat, then that was the way it was going to be. It was a cool night, just the way she liked it. Autumn had finally come to the city after a boiling summer, and as she trundled along in the darkness Katie relived, as she always did, the high points of her evening's group session. Tears. Yes, there were always tears as well as hand wringing, blushing, stammering, and sweating aplenty. But there was generally a special moment as well, a breakthrough moment that made listening to hours of repetitious personal details finally worthwhile. Tonight that moment had come in the persons of Felix and Dolores (last names withheld) who'd joined EiA with the express purpose of `recapturing the magic' of their marriage after each of them had spent two years -- and twenty thousand pounds -- exploring their individual sexual issues. Felix had long since admitted seeking satisfaction outside the realm of his wedding vows and Dolores had herself owned up to enjoying her vibrator and a picture of Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff far more than the marital embrace of her spouse. But on this night, Felix's ruminations on why the sight of Dolores's bare bum brought on thoughts of his mother in her declining years was too much for three of the middle-aged women in the group who attacked him verbally and so viciously that Dolores herself sprang passionately to his defence, apparently washing away her husband's aversion to her backside with the sacred water of her tears. Husband and wife subsequently fell into each other's arms, lip-l! ocked, and cried out in unison, `You've saved our marriage!' at the meeting's conclusion. She'd done nothing more than give them a forum, Katie admitted to herself. But that's all some people really wanted, anyway: an opportunity to humiliate themselves or their beloved in public, creating a situation from which the beloved could ultimately rescue or be provided rescue. There was a genuine gold mine in dealing with the sexual dilemmas of the British population. Katie considered herself more than astute to have realised that fact. She yawned widely and felt her stomach growl. A good day's work and a good evening's work meant a good meal as a reward to herself followed by a good wallow with a video. She favoured old films for their nuances of romance. Fading to black at the crucial moment got her juices flowing far more efficiently than close ups of body parts and a sound track filled with heavy breathing. It Happened One Night would be her choice: Clark and Claudette and all that delicious tension between them. That's what missing in most relationships, Katie thought for the thousandth time that month. Sexual tension. There's nothing left to the imagination between men and women any longer. It's a know-all, tell-all, photograph-all world, with nothing to anticipate and even less left secret. But she couldn't complain. The state of the world was making her rich, and fat though she was, no one gave her aggro when they saw the house she lived in, the clothes she wore, the jewellery she bought, or the car she drove. She approached that car now, where she'd left it that morning, in a private car park across the street and round the corner from the clinic in which she spent her days. She found that she was breathing more heavily than usual as she paused on the kerb before crossing. She put one hand on a lamppost for support and felt her heart struggling to keep up its job. Perhaps she ought to consider the weight loss programme her doctor had suggested, she thought. But a second later, she rejected the idea. What was life for if not to be enjoyed? A breeze came up and blew her hair from her cheeks. She felt it cooling the back of her neck. A minute of rest was all she needed. She'd be fit as ever when she caught her breath. She stood and listened to the silent neighbourhood. It was partly commercial and partly residential, with businesses that were closed at this hour and houses long ago converted to flats with windows whose curtains were drawn against the night. Odd, she thought. She'd never really noticed the quiet or the emptiness of these streets after dark. She looked round and realised that anything could happen in this sort of place -- anything good, anything bad -- and it would be solely left to chance if there was a witness to what occurred. A chill coursed through her. Better move on. She stepped off the kerb. She began to cross. She didn't see the car at the end of the street till its lights switched on and blinded her. It barrelled towards her with a sound like a bull. She tried to hurry forward but the car was upon her. She was far too fat to get out of its way. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title. 
- Title: What Came Before He Shot Her
- Description:
The shocking conclusion of Elizabeth George's previous bestseller, "With No One As Witness", saw the wife of New Scotland Yard's Thomas Lynley gunned down in the street outside her home. Under arrest for the crime is a twelve-year-old boy, Joel Campbell. What possible motive could he have? What chain of events could have led such a child from the housing estates of North Kensington to the elegant streets of Belgravia with such deadly intent? The answer to these questions is a complex mixture of fate and circumstance. Abandoned (albeit involuntarily) by his parents, Joel and two siblings are dumped on the doorstep of his aunt's house. Kendra, childless and with two marriages behind her, is doing her best to turn her life around; responsibility for three troubled children is not what she had in mind. Drugs, neglect, violence and poverty are commonplace in North Kensington. Joel does his best to look out for his family, but that involves a Faustian pact and the Devil will have his pay. 
- Title: A Place Of Hiding
- Description:
Millionaire Guy Brouard has made his home on Guernsey and acted as patron and benefactor to many of the islanders. So his murder comes as a shock - and puts many of their schemes in jeopardy. The young woman arrested for the crime is China River, a Californian photographer who was only on Guernsey in the first place as a favour to her brother, Cherokee. In shock at this turn of events, Cherokee seeks help from his only UK contact - Deborah St James, a long-standing friend of his sister. Dealing with personal issues in her marriage and her career, Deborah rushes impulsively to the island to address this miscarriage of justice, accompanied - albeit reluctantly - by her husband, Simon, whose skills as a forensic pathologist and whose connections with Scotland Yard, will prove useful. As the couple penetrate the close-knit Guernsey community in order to solve the crime, they discover it has its roots in the island's history of Nazi Occupation. They also discover things about themselves, and their own relationship, along the way. About the Author Elizabeth George is the author of highly acclaimed novels of psychological suspense. Her first novel, A GREAT DELIVERANCE, was honoured with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards in America and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France; WELL-SCHOOLED IN MURDER was awarded the prestigious German prize for international mystery fiction, the MIMI (1990). Her novels have now been adapted for television by the BBC. An Edgar and Macavity Nominee as well as a New York Times and international bestselling author, Elizabeth George divides time between California and Kensington, London. 
- Title: A Great Deliverance (inspector Lynley Mystery)
- Description:
Fat, unlovely Roberta Teys is found beside her father\'s headless corpse, wearing her best dress and with an axe in her lap. Her first words are: \'I did it. And I am not sorry\' and she refuses to say more. Inspector Thomas Lynley and DS Barbara Havers are sent by Scotland Yard to solve this particularly gruesome murder. And as they navigate their way around a dark labyrinth of secret scandals and appalling crimes, they uncover a series of shocking revelations that shatter the facade of the peaceful Yorkshire village. About the Author Elizabeth George is the author of highly acclaimed novels of psychological suspense. Her first novel, A Great Deliverance, was honoured with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards in America and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France; Well-Schooled in Murder was awarded the prestigious German prize for international mystery fiction, the MIMI (1990). Her novels have now been adapted for television by the BBC. An Edgar and Macavity Nominee as well as a New York Times and international bestselling author, Elizabeth George divides her time between California and Kensington, London. 
- Title: A Suitable Vengeance (inpector Lynley Mysteries)
- Description:
Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley has brought to his ancestral home the young woman he hopes will be his bride. But the savage murder of a local journalist sets off a series of tragic events that will alter the course of Lynley's life forever. About the Author Susan Elizabeth GeorgeElizabeth George's first novel, A Great Deliverance, was honoured with the Anthony and Agatha Best First Novel awards in America and received the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France. That was followed by the critically acclaimed Payment in Blood and then Well-Schooled in Murder, which was awarded the prestigious German prize for international mystery fiction, the MIMI, in 1990. Her later novels are the highly acclaimed A Suitable Vengeance, For the Sake of Elena, Missing Joseph, Playing for the Ashes and In the Presence of the Enemy. Elizabeth George divides her time between Huntington Beach, California, and London. She is currently working on her ninth novel.
