Inspector Lynley is called upon by his boss’s boss to investigate an accidental drowning at a wealthy businessman’s estate. It’s all on the hush-hush and he can’t tell his immediate supervisor where he’s going or what he’s doing. This would in itself be a problem but it becomes much more complex because he and his boss are having an affair. Given the awkward situation he asks his friends the St. James to travel to the country and help him. One is a forensic pathologist and the other is a photographer. The businessman’s son is a prime suspect for the death of his cousin, Ian who ran the family business of selling toilets. The son, Nick, is a ne’er do well addict and troublemaker who has married a beautiful wife from South America and returned home to turn over a new leaf and rebuild his life while helping older homeless men out of their addictions and vagrancy. While Lynley and St. James investigate the boathouse where the accident occurred, St. James’ wife Deborah goes to meet the son and his wife at home. While having tea she notices a magazine on conception, childbirth on the table and flipping through it, sees several pages torn from the back. Deborah herself is interested in this magazine because she and St. James have been unable to have a child of their own, she will never be able to carry a baby to term. So she tries every way she can to make friends with this beautiful South American woman who she feels she can establish a bond with over their shared problems with starting a family.
Lynley also enlists Barbara Havers, his work partner to do some digging back in London. She finds every one of the family, all their history, some good, some bad, but can’t find anything on Nick’s wife, no photos, no history except a family name that comes up as the mayor of a small town in Argentina. When she contacts them, it appears they recognize her name but because of the language barrier (Barbara does not speak Spanish except maybe to order a beer) she can’t make out what they’re saying.
The plot has a lot of twists and turns. The man who died had left his wife for his male lover some time ago and now his teenage son and young daughter are left living with the latter after the death of their father. Their mother apparently wants nothing to do with the children. Tim, the teenage boy, is in bad shape, enrolled in a school for troubled youth but bound and determined to take out his rage on something, and soon. He is self-destructive and when his aunt tries to help he ends up attacking her. The aunt, Manette, is in the middle of a family crisis herself, having divorced her husband, Freddie who still lives in the same house, but who has decided to start dating again. He finds that today’s dates often want to find out if they’re sexually compatible right away, because what’s the point if not, right? So she would readily take the children but she can’t given that her husband is regularly sleeping out all night or having potential mates show up at the house. This family is a mess. Freddie starts looking at the business accounts that Ian was managing up until his death, and finds all sorts of money being paid out to children, former employees, and Nick’s projects. It has to come to an end and he calls on his in-laws with Manette and they begin discussing these payments. The matriarch of the family is still head of the board of directors, her husband started out at the firm and worked his way to the top as well as into the family which he now heads. Lynley by now has been identified as the inspector he really is, and a lot of truths come crawling out of the woodwork. The husband has been having affairs for years and one of the daughters, Mignon, has been blackmailing him, threatening to tell her mother not only about the woman but also about the child she has with him. and as it turns out, as far as Lynley and St. James can tell, there was nothing suspicious about the cousin’s death. It was an accident due to loose stones on the dock in the boathouse. The mother requested her husband to call in Scotland Yard to investigate because she wanted to find out about her husband. She saw it as an opportunity to find out the truth under guise of foul play in Ian’s death. But what no one realized was that another secret was hidden at Nick’s home, his wife had been born a male and had fled to Mexico, where he became the lover of a wealthy man who paid for surgery to become a female. She then fled to the United States to begin her life as a woman in body and spirit, where she met Nick during his wild days in the western US. They fell in love and she never told him the truth, just that she used to pose for underwear magazines and was involved with the Mexican tycoon and so didn’t want any photos of her to be published, afraid that he would look her up and ruin her life with Nick. Deborah St. James’ efforts to find out about this woman caused her to panic. She knew Deborah wasn’t being truthful, and had hooked up with a young reporter from a tabloid magazine. She thought the two of them were out to expose her and went out on the flats to try to run away, but was caught in quick sand and the incoming tide, lost in a fog that had swept in ahead of the tidal bore. Deborah confronted the woman just before she panicked and would always know that she had caused her death. Especially when her husband and Lynley both had asked, begged, and demanded, as much as they could, to let it drop. She finally realized that it was her own longing for a child that had made her want to be friends with this woman. She could never have a child herself, but had found a woman who would carry a baby for her, they planned to go abroad for a time before the birth and she would return with the infant her husband so wanted. A foolish plan these days, since DNA testing would show that neither father or mother carried the same genes. What a mess. It was a good story, very intriguing and I stayed up way too late one Saturday night reading the end of it.
I do enjoy Elizabeth George’s work, the plots are always interesting, the only thing I don’t like is the use of so much explicit sex in her stories. I guess I’m old fashioned enough to wish the implication not be so very well spelled out, but that’s the norm these days. I guess books don’t sell unless they’ve got plenty of sexy details on display. Still a good read though.