The mysteries are tricky and intricate and at times perverse and bleak. But they are always solved, except maybe once when a fake solution was accepted. Inspector Lynley is maybe posh, as The Guardian said, since he is a Lord by birth and practices policework as a profession, one of these few professions a hereditary lord can practice. There are very few.
His assistant is a woman who is quite different from him but the two together are a funny pair more or less always staying within acceptable irregularities according to police ethics. But Lynley is going to the crime with his impulsive belief and conviction, whereas Barbara Havers goes to it with her empathy. When dealing with criminals and psychopaths, empathy is a weak point since the criminals and psychopaths just want this empathy so that they can play on it and manipulate the police, the situation they are in. The last case is typical of that. Two criminals absolutely equal in horror and viciousness and they play differently on the two cops to capture somewhere the empathy or the hostility they need to save their fate, at least if they have any future fate. They seem to think so.
But in all these cases, it looks like some salient features are coming out like the fact many of these cases concern children or teenagers or very young men or women becoming the victims of people older than they are. But in the last two seasons, they seemed to have come to some kind of a dead end. The first paramour of Inspector Lynley moved out of the police after a dramatic accident that killed her baby-to-be. One season later she came back under the name of another actress but to be purely shot dead by some Bosnian woman trying to shoot the man who killed her whole family in Bosnia. So, Lynley had two wives in the series, and in both cases, they ended dead or at least estranged after the death of their unborn child.
There is maybe slightly too much of this family business and maybe not enough of the crime side of the cases. The criminals are too often psychopaths who do not have any depth. They are just psychopaths, and that is the way the cases are dealt with which is the problem. It is always some technical connection between a crime and a criminal, but no real exploration of the motivations. The first wife of Lynley in the series was a profiler but her profiling was very dry, as dry as a fingerprint on a weapon or some DNA on a glass. You could do better than that, even when you are the Earl of Asherton. The empathy side of Barbara Havers is better but it never has the upper hand.
That's OK if you are only looking for some entertainment because the social or cultural depth is rather shallow, gliding over things as if they were hawks and then pouncing onto the prey as if the prey were a juicy piece of running rat or rodent.
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
