There can’t be many readers of crime novels who don’t eagerly await new Elizabeth George novels. For obvious reasons I wasn’t paying attention last year, so we missed the arrival of Careless in Red. However, on my March/April US trip, I clearly passed through an airport bookshop or two, and was very pleased to find a new Lynley mystery.

Like all EG books, this one has many well drawn characters, and a complicated enough plot to keep one guessing most of the way through. Oh to be sure I’d guessed the ultimate outcome early on, but it was one of a spectrum of possible outcomes and she managed to keep all those balls in the air for a long time … I couldn’t be sure. In that sense it was a perfect crime novel, following the scent, with a hunch, but without the evidence. There’s a nice twist in the tail … It’s set in Cornwall, and we’ve got the usual suspects: Lynley and Havers, but for a change there’s another senior female police person, who plays a role rather like one might imagine Havers having in a parallel universe (where she’s married another copper - Lynley say - and had kids, and it hasn’t quite panned out). I liked the juxtaposition of these two, both bossing Lynley around in their different ways. Both being controlled by Lynley, in different ways.

If you like crime novels, and I do, you’ll like this one, and I did. This one’s a keeper.