Her detecive thrillers are clever, intuitive, have nice twists, good, well evoked settings, and are very well written, if somewhat OVER written.
the mystery here is first class as ever. she writes with the style of agatha christie, and comes up with solutions that the dead queen would be proud of. It is only a shame that Lynley is not quite as interesting as Poirot. However, the relationships the main characters 5 characters really are VERY interesting. they add weight, credibility, and realism to the story. they add a more personal and intimate side, and prove an ongoing drama to mix with that of the different crimes which come up in each book.
She is very good at drawing her character, and very good at coming up with agatha christie style plots. her psychology is accurate, and her writing very descriptive.
Definitely worth a read. This second book was very very good. So far, i dont think she written a bad one, and i've read nearly all of them. A good build up A Great Deliverance, and got the series off to a really smashing start.
I also thought that the coincidence of Lady Helen being on the scene of a murder, and intimately involved, was a bit of a stretch, but was able to accept it with just a grain of salt.
George did a fairly good job of giving us more insight into the main characters (Lynley, Havers, Helen, and Deborah) and fleshed out their backgrounds quite well.
I thought that the last third of the book was far too dragged out...I found myself skimming a lot.
Thomas Lynley has to confront his feelings for Lady Helen Clyde, whose lover may (or may not) be implicated in a murder. Lynley is, at first, remarkably blind to his own feelings, and then lets jealously completely overtake himself and his judgement. He also is blind to the ways that Scotland Yard CID is manipulating him, taking advantage of his class assumptions and loyalties.
Barabara Havers, with her own set of class assumptions and much more stunted interpersonal relations, has to confront her loyalties to Lynley and to her career, and is the character who probably grows the most in this book.
There are quite a few "red herrings" here, from a traditional mystery perspective. I am usually les interested in figuring out mystery stories than I am in the character development along the way, but I will say that I figured out the villain in this one!