For the Sake of Elena

Its place in Inspector Lynley

For the Sake of Elena is book 5 in the Inspector Lynley series. It follows A Suitable Vengeance. It is followed by Missing Joseph. See the full Inspector Lynley reading order.

Thomas Lynley, 8th Earl of Asherton, is a Scotland Yard detective who happens to be minor aristocracy — a premise Elizabeth George uses to explore British class friction from the inside, especially through his prickly, working-class partner DS Barbara Havers, whose resentment of and eventual loyalty to Lynley is one of the great slow-burn partnerships in crime fiction. George, an American writing English detective fiction with unusual authority, builds each novel as a dense, doorstop-length literary mystery…