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. Keep watching my blog for more book reviews! Book blurb: And it also reminds me of the setup of Agatha Christie‘s Miss Marple series (by the way, I am a big fan of Agatha Christie books and as the reviews posted on my blog will show the count of her books being 20+). In fact, as my dear friend Addy says, the people have such great meat on the bones, such characterization of British times (yes, it is a historical murder mystery) that it feels you are transported as one of the witnesses of what is happening in the book around you. The way Elizabeth George has described the scenes creates an aura of such great visualization of the country but at the same time not make it feel superfluous at all. And if otherwise, give this book a skip and read the next ones in this series, I am sure you would love Inspector Lynley, the main protagonist of this series. Though the crude murder mystery solving made me suffer a night or two, if you are not easily affected by murders, you should read this book. But hey, the one by Ross Welford is another great book whose review here will follow soon, very soon). You know I have a very bad habit of reading two or more books simultaneously but once I started this book, I was so focused on finding what actually happened with the murder and what was happening with the detectives (ok, ignore the part that I was reading in between 1000 Year Old Boy by Ross Welford but very very slowly for it was accessible on my mobile and this one, I was reading on my Kindle.

And I was so happy once I started reading it that I completed it quickly. This is one book which came highly recommended by my book-reading-group-member-turned-new-friend Addy.

Lynley a great deliverance