Product Description

The sudden death of Guy Brouard after his morning swim shocks the residents of Guernsey. A generous patron and benefactor of the island since his arrival there a decade ago, his demise puts a question mark over many cherished projects.
When a young American woman is charged with the murder, her brother seeks help from the only contact he has in the UK - Deborah St James. Deborah is horrified to find that her old friend has been arrested and persuades her husband Simon to accompany her to Guernsey to avert this miscarriage of justice.
There they find a tangled web of deceit and betrayal, with its origins in wartime occupation. In solving the crime, they must rely on their long-standing friendship with Inspector Lynley; they must also learn painful lessons about loyalty and trust, and the loving tyranny of family ties. (20040227)

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #114470 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-12
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Amaazon.co.uk Review
A Place of Hiding is a solidly crafted novel by one of the queens of the traditional detective story, Elizabeth George. Someone killed millionaire Guy Brouard by slipping him a sedative and popping a stone in his throat and the Guernsey police have opted for a suspect who has, from their point of view, the advantage of being an American stranger. However, China has the good fortune of knowing English friends who are determined to see that justice is done, and who feel considerable loyalty to her and her brother Cherokee.

Elizabeth George relies heavily on misdirection--there are almost too many suspects for this killing because Brouard was a games-player with a distinctly iffy set of personal habits and relatives. Not least among the plot strands is the whole question of Guernsey's occupation by the Germans in WW2; Brouard's involvement in a scheme to establish a Museum of Occupation precipitates an entirely different set of tragic events at a tangent to those surrounding his own death. This is a book impressively pervaded by vividly evoked places and by the legacies of history, both national and family; the eventual revelations about specific guilt and innocence are secondary, in a sense, to the implication that we are all involved, dangerously, in each other's lives. --Roz Kaveney

Jane Adams, Amazon.com
'A fine addition to George's ouevre, this thirteenth outing in her popular series will delight her fans.'

Review
'This exquisitely plotted mystery bursts with well-developed characters . . . With her flair for language, George reinforces her reputation as one of today’s finest mystery writers.' (Publishers Weekly )

'her nuanced characterizations drive the novel . . . this commands attention . . . dense, complex, and riveting.' (Booklist (USA) )

'highly absorbing . . . enough cliffhangers and red herrings to keep you guessing to the end.' (Sarah Broadhurst,Bookseller )

'A fine addition to George's ouevre, this thirteenth outing in her popular series will delight her fans.' (Jane Adams, Amazon.com )

'excellent holiday reading from one of the queens of the traditional detective story.' (Sainsbury's Magazine (June 04) )

Customer Reviews

A competent thriller
BAD THINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK
- At a page count of over 600, the story is rather bloated. It could have been told more effectively in 400 pages.
- I think Elizabeth suffers from thesaurus-mania. She perseveres in her custom of employing very convoluted and curious words where an uncomplicated one would have sufficed.
- This book proves that meticulous research doesn't always guarantee authenticity. Elizabeth is a Californian anglophile and her novels are peppered with the quirks and details of British life - but for someone who actually lives in the UK, it just doesn't read true.
- Where is Barbara Havers?

GOOD THINGS ABOUT THIS BOOK
- It's a labour of love. The author seems to write without too much regard for what sells or not, which oddly enough makes for more enjoyable reading.
- It's got a satisfying tangled and twisted plot.
- It's got three-dimensional and intriguing characters.
- It evokes atmosphere and tensions brilliantly.

On the whole, it's a competently crafted detective story - and who really cares if it is really, really realistic? If you're on the lookout for a thumping great read, this should do the trick.

Please go back to Lynley and Havers!
Don't get me wrong, this is a very good book. But the main characters (Simon and his wife) are not as interesting as Lynley and Havers. Besides I waited more than a year for this book because I wanted to know what was going to happen with Barbara and her neighbors just to find out that she is not mentioned in this new book in the series.

I hope George goes back to the characters that really characterize this series in her next book!

An excellent mystery
After what I consider to be the brilliant panoramic psychological masterpiece that was A Traitor To Memory, Elizabeth George here shifts the focus back to a more traditional story of crime and more onto her main characters once more, in a book that is sure to please all her fans immensely, despite their opinion of her last book.

Here, she takes the story to the Channel Island of Gurnsey, an enclosed community very much with its own individual identity, which she evokes very well indeed. One morning, Guy Brouard, millionaire and generous benefactor of many projects on the island, is killed on the beach after his morning swim, and his death will send disastrous ripples through not only his own fractured family, but the fragile community too.

A plethora of evidence is discovered that clearly implicates someone, one China River, an American staying on the island for a few days after couriering a package for Guy over from the USA., and she is swiftly arrested. Desperate to prove his sister’s innocence, and having found no aid at the American embassy, Cherokee River (their mother was a hippie, of course) rushes to England to enlist the help of the only person he can think of: Deborah St James, China’s old friend from youth. Maybe there is something she can do, perhaps? However, when even a word from friend in the Metropolitan Police Thomas Lynley has no influence upon the Gurnsey police, Deborah (with Cherokee and husband Simon in tow) hurries to the island to help save her friend, and to atone for past failings.

Fans of Elizabeth George will love this, If they don’t mind that Deborah and Simon take the lead rather than the usual partnership of Lynley and Havers. Certainly I found it refreshing and rather nice that she’s brought these two characters out of the shadows a little more and given their relationship an almost incredible amount of depth all in a single book. George is adept at creating realistic and engrossing relationships between her main characters.

But, then, character has always been George’s strong point. There are very few writers today who can create so many completely rounded and whole and human characters, make them all equally interesting and give them all equal shrift and importance within a single novel.

And it’s not as if she skimps on plot here, either. It’s developed, multi-stranded, paced very well indeed, has a very good solution and is wholly satisfying. She tells her story with beautiful and incredibly rich prose, and in my mind is probably the finest American exponent of this type of traditional British mystery (even if she doesn’t always get it 100% right, but that doesn’t matter.) Existing fans will love this book and may think it her strongest in a while, and I would also encourage anyone whose never read her before and likes this kind of book to begin with A Place Of Hiding as soon as possible.