The writing is superb and the characters are amazing. This book took me just two days to finish. While Lynley seems rather bland despite emotion roiling beneath the surface, it is Havers' painful secrets and driving rage that encourage one to overlook decidedly uneven passages in this essentially intriguing psychological thriller. In sifting slowly through the ashes of the past, the detectives find enough horrific skeletons in every closet to lead them to a climax unexpectedly loaded with fire and fury. Inspector Thomas Lynley is smooth, attractive and utterly upper-class 'stubby, sturdy'' detective-sergeant Barbara Havers, conscious of her plain appearance and lower-class origins, considers Lynley a ``sodding little fop.'' Thrown together, they weigh the general conviction in the villagethat Roberta could not possibly have wielded the bloody axeagainst mounting evidence that damns the now catatonic girl. The detectives sent by Scotland Yard to investigate are a mismatched pair.

The legendharking back to violent events in Cromwell's timethat surrounds local Keldale Abbey pales in comparison to a modern-day crime committed in this quiet corner of Yorkshire, England: Roberta Teys, a silent, obese adolescent, is accused of killing her church-going father with an axe. In her debut novel, George too often plays to the gallery with characterizations broad enough to border on caricature. Yet as Lynley and Havers wind their way through Keldale's dark labyrinth of secret scandals and appalling crimes, they uncover a shattering series of revelations that will reverberate through this tranquil English valley-and in their own lives as well. For fat, unlovely Roberta Teys has been found in her best dress, an axe in her lap, seated in the old stone barn beside her father's headless corpse.

Along with the redoubtable Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, Lynley has been sent to solve a savage murder that has stunned the peaceful countryside. Now into Keldale's pastoral web of old houses and older secrets comes Scotland Yard Inspector Thomas Lynley, the eighth earl of Asherton. Three hundred years ago, as legend goes, the frightened Yorkshire villagers smothered a crying babe in Keldale Abbey, where they'd hidden to escape the ravages of Cromwell's raiders. To this day, the low, thin wail of an infant can be heard in Keldale's lush green valleys.

Lynley a great deliverance