George understands poverty.

books:


	• What Came Before He Shot Her Elizabeth George Harper, 2007 - 736 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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It's Different, Innit?

Though Elizabeth George thanks her editors for going along and supporting her decision to take up the Helen Lynley murder case once again, by digging deep into the London slum boy who committed the crime, anyone can read between the lines and imagine the strangled gasp of horror that must have attended the editors hearing this disastrous news.

They may have feigned enthusiasm to please a favored author, but inwardly they must have known what life would be like from now on. They would be forced to wade through hundreds of murky pages of seedy slumdwellers with improbable accents, the very bottom of the barrel sort of people whom their creator must have researched by multiple readings of LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH and also by watching Wesley Snipes in BLADE. Not since Nelson Algren have the lives of the wretched been told with so much camp value, and not since the days of Reconstruction has any white woman gone in and mangled so many clack and mixed race accents without a care in the world except telling a good story and pointing out racial injustice.

Oh well the world of the book editor, trying to rein in a bestseller with a bee in her bonnet, has never been a safe place, and these poor men and women probably at least told themselves, we will only be alienating about half of her former fans, and there will still be many more still standing to buy CARELESS IN RED, people who really love Barbara Havers and savor her interactions with Linley, and someday in the future the locution, "Jo-ell," will drop completely out of their brain banks.

All in all, it's a complete departure for Elizabeth George and a study in sociopathology to rival, well, not Dostoevsky.

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Accidental find

I read this book because I began to read "Careless in Red" and got the impression that I should read the prior book first. Oddly, I read "What happened before he shot her" and enjoyed it. I then started "Careless" and stopped reading it about a third of the way through. Enjoyed the other one though.

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George understands poverty.

This book is a powerful and riveting account of what happens to children in poverty when they are faced with limited choices, inadequate or ineffective family support, and the laws of the street. The author absolutely knows and understands the issues of living in poverty, and indeed, she taught for many years in Santa Ana, CA. Part of the power of this book is the author's ability to empathize with her characters and explain their behavior to those who don't. But those of you who think this kind of environment is limited to the streets of West London, think again. Having worked and lived in poverty environments both in Boston, MA, and Long Beach, CA, I can attest to the similar challenges faced by our own urban poor.

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Good concept but...

I am a huge fan of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley series, but I must admit that I feel very ambivalent about "What Came Before He Shot Her". It is a hugely ambitious prequel to "With No One As Witness" and explores the chaotic series of events leading up to the shocking (and, I must say, shockingly inexplicable) murder of Inspector Lynley's wife of a few months, Lady Helen. Whilst Lady Helen has always been a supremely irritating character, I would have much preferred George to have knocked off that tedious megabore, Deborah St James. Now there's a character that needs to be excised from the Inspector Lynley series, post haste. She is as dull as ditchwater!!! Whilst I found the novel readable, I can't really say that I enjoyed it. The book explores the relentlessly bleak lives of the Campbell siblings Vanessa, Joel and Toby, half-caste black children living in London. I was disappointed in the cookie-cutter stereotyping of the characters in the books - the black women were all raging hose beasts, ready to have sex with any male in their immediate vicinity, the black males were all drug dealers, stoners or street thugs, with only one exception. I found the Jamaican dialect spoken by the characters difficult to follow at times and the non-stop catalogue of woes befalling the main characters wouldn't have been out-of-place in a Lemony Snicket novel. Perhaps the novel should have been called "A Series of Unfortunate Events, Part 2". Whilst I applaud Ms George for undertaking such an ambitious writing project, I think it fell short of its mark. It was also FAR too long and did not need 707 pages to tell the story. It needed much more judicious editing and could have easily been 200 pages shorter, at the very least.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9

A kind and well-loved woman was brutally and inexplicably murdered?the pregnant wife of a respected police inspector?and her death has left Scotland Yard shocked and searching for answers. Perhaps most horrifying of all, the trigger of the weapon that killed her was apparently pulled by a stranger . . . a twelve-year-old boy.

The anatomy of a murder, the story of a family in crisis, What Came Before He Shot Her is a powerful, emotional novel full of deep psychological insights, a novel that only the incomparable Elizabeth George could write.

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