‘With No One Witness’ by Elizabeth George
 Published by Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-82748-3

 

A serial killer is stalking London, targeting young teenage boys, torturing and  mutilating them, and leaving the bodies in conspicuous places as if wanting them to be found. Which the killer does - we enter his mind; he calls himself Fu, thinking of himself in the third person, godlike, killing to redeem, ‘Creature Divine, Eternal Deity of what must be. His was the truth and His was the way. . . .’ The first four killings are not linked, as the bodies are found in different locations, and they are black or of mixed race and so are, to an extent, disregarded as having any connection. It is only with the fifth, a white boy, that the existence of a serial killer is suspected. This, for a Scotland Yard smarting under accusations of institutionalised racism, is political dynamite.

Acting Superintendent Thomas Lynley (aka 8th Earl of Asherton) is assigned to the case, along with his usual team, including Detective Sergeant Winston Nkata and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, the latter dumpy, frumpy and grumpy as ever, lucky to be reinstated after some of her previous outings, and terminally insubordinate. Lynley also has visited upon him, much against his will, a psychological profiler, Dr. Hamish Robson. Robson, despite Lynleys doubts, comes up with a useful likely assessment of the killer: a white male, aged 25-35, neat appearance, an underachiever resentful of his low status, probably known to his victims. This leads Lynley and his team to the one place that the victims have in common: Colossus, a centre that aims to point young people in trouble in a different direction. The Colossus director, Ulrike Ellis, is initially hostile. But several of the workers at Colossus fit the psychological profile could the killer be one of them?

However, there are leads which point elsewhere: to New Age shops in Bermondsey and Camden Lock, to the apparently kindly Mr. Magic, to a paedophile network. Is this what links the dead boys to their killer? And when Assistant Commissioner Sir David Hillier, angered by the slow progress of the investigation, inflicts the reporter Mitchell Corsico on Lynley team to be embedded with them, tragedy, unforeseen yet inevitable, ensues.

In this densely-plotted thriller, the detectives private lives are intertwined with the search for the killer: Lynley's wife Helen and the eagerly-awaited new baby; Havers relationship with her neighbour Taymullah Aznar and his daughter Haddiyah; Nkatas edgy association with Yasmin Edwards and her son Daniel. Through all this stumps the oddly likeable figure of Barbara Havers: determined, dedicated, loyal, remaining her own woman despite all the pressures to conform, a true member of the awkward squad yet in the end winning out. Like Elizabeth George's previous books, this is a big one: 664 pages of fairly small type. But for all the intricate storyline and numerous fully-delineated characters, the plot is not confusing. A good long read is guaranteed.

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Radmila May
Other books by Elizabeth George: A Great Deliverance, Payment in Blood, Well-Schooled in Murder, A Suitable Vengeance, For the Sake of Elena, Missing Joseph, Playing for the Ashes, In the Presence of the Enemy,  Deception on his Mind, In Pursuit of the Proper Killer, and A Place of Hiding. Short story collections: The Evidence Exposed, I, Richard; Non-fiction: Write Away: One Novelist's Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life.