A Great Deliverance (Inspector Lynley series Book 1) opens on the train from Sussex to London: a timid Catholic priest accidentally sneezes into a woman’s face. He is delivering evidence in a murder case to Scotland Yard. She, a formidable dowager, is obviously a pillar of the Church of England. She regards him with loathing. He imagines in hilarious detail all the horrible things she must think of him. Finally she disembarks, devastating him with a priceless putdown. We never see her again, but we know that we are in the hands of a master writer. And this was Elizabeth George’s first novel back in 1988!

The priest continues on to Scotland Yard to present the facts of the murder case: someone beheaded a farmer from his village, and local cops have charged the man’s troubled daughter with murder. The wily Superintendent Webberly knows he must assign the right detectives to the case. Inexplicably, he chooses Sergeant Barbara Havers recently demoted from Homicide back to street detail.

Havers seems to be what people nowadays would call a “borderline” personality: a seething mass of hostility and self-loathing. Because she cannot get along with any of the loutish male detectives, she is hanging onto her career by her fingernails. When she learns from Webberly that she will be entrusted with a murder case, she feels a rush of pathetic excitement. You can’t help liking her for being so dedicated to her work. But then she learns that her partner will be a certain Inspector Lynley. In fact, he will be her commanding officer on the case.

She barely makes it to the bathroom before bursting into tears of frustration. She rages at herself and at the hated Inspector Lynley. We read in fascinated incomprehension, picking up the impression that Lynley is some sort of James Bond lothario: rich, handsome, suave, and a total womanizer.

Why else would an actual titled lord like Lynley become a police detective? Surely not to help people! Surely his police career is a ruse to make him seem interesting so he can lure women to his bed! Surely Webberly paired Havers, the most unattractive woman at Scotland Yard, with Lynley on this particular case in order to tamp down the man’s sex drive and keep him out of trouble!

You soon realize that Havers has bigger problems than her career. She lives in working-class squalor with a mother driven crazy by her younger brother’s death years ago from leukemia. Her father is an unreliable petty criminal who bounces in and out of jail. Havers carries deep guilt for her role in her mother’s insanity, which becomes clear over the course of the novel. In fact, Havers manages to hold herself together only by focusing on her immense hatred for the beautiful aristocrats of the world who live the impossibly charmed life that she does not. Inspector Lynley symbolizes all of that.

However, Lynley is a decent and perceptive man who is greatly shaken by Havers’ hatred towards him. He’s not the womanizer she thinks he is. In fact, he is desperately in love with the wife of his best friend – a man whose ruined health is a result of Lynley’s own irresponsibility back when they were wild youths and got into a car accident with Lynley at the wheel. Like Havers, Lynley has his own demons of guilt and regret.

Now the two of them must go up to Sussex to investigate a gruesome murder. Lynley must cope with an antagonistic police chief (a personal enemy from his past) while striving to draw forth Havers’s self-confidence and trust. In the meantime, an entire village of suspects confronts him. In the balance hangs the future of the farmer’s daughter who has been committed to a mental institution and who refuses to talk.

A Great Deliverance is an outstanding novel that offers you the sheer delight of seeing richly-drawn and complicated characters struggling to handle great physical and psychological danger. A Great Deliverance is available on Amazon.com through this link: A Great Deliverance (Inspector Lynley)