Lynley & Havers are back…

Every workday I spend about two hours in a train, commuting in and out of the Ruhr metropolitan area. I always have something to read in my bag. Newspaper, magazines, the latest chapter of a Grey’s fanfic or a book I’m currently reading. Although I should not bag any book, but rather part of my study material, because I really have to get back into some routine with the literature of my postgraduate studies. But instead for the last few days I read a great non-fictional book from Thilo Bode, the founder of foodwatch, )german consumer-rights NGO). It’s a perfect book to read while commuting, because of the short chapters and because you can easily stop reading, when you have to get off the train, because you’re not drawn into a compelling plot and need to know what happens next. I was determined to limit reading the novels that might really pull me in and let me forget about everything else, to my time at home. When I have some spare time and am done with all the tasks I had to do for the day.

Two days ago I started reading the latest Lynley crime novel “Careless in Red”. And of course I failed big time with all my determination. Today I even left the non-fiction at home and bagged the heavy hardcover novel instead. My justfication: The more time I’ve got to read this, the sooner I will have finished it and the sooner I can get back to all the tasks and chores I need to be doing. Pathetic excuse, I know, and I’m not even buying it myself. I’m just a book-loving-girl with no self-control. It’s sad. But on the other hand: it’s not. Not at all. I love it.

The story so far (p 195 of 623) has totally pulled me in. There are a lot of interesting characters and almost all of them have their own agenda and I haven’t even started to figure out what the relations and connections between all of them or between them and the victim are. It’s the good old mystery of a crime novel.

And then there is DI Thomas Lynley, Earl of Asherton, on a lone and gruesome hike along the coast, hoping to come to terms with the horrible things that happened to him. I have to admit I’ve never been a big fan of Helen. I didn’t dislike her either, I just couldn’t relate to her like I definitely can to Barbara Havers. Or even Deborah St. James in some ways. But she was Tommys wife and so I sort of liked her by proxy. And seeing Tommy in the state he is in, because he lost the woman he loved, his unborn son, his future and just everything that ever mattered to him, is so painful. Elizabeth George manages to portray him as the broken man he became in such an extraordinary perfect way, that I’m still in awe. I almost want to fly to Cornwell, drive to Casvelyn and give him a big hug :-) But instead I settle back in my armchair with this book, some chocolate cappuccino and maybe some chocolate…

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