Playing for the Ashes

Its place in Inspector Lynley

Playing for the Ashes is book 7 in the Inspector Lynley series. It follows Missing Joseph. It is followed by In the Presence of the Enemy. 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…