Playing for the Ashes

With a British cricket term as its title, the seventh crime novel (after Missing Joseph ) featuring English Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers probes the proximity of love and hate. After cricket star Kenneth Fleming is found asphyxiated in a burned cottage on the estate of Miriam Whitelaw, his patron, Lynley and Havers, with local Detective Inspector Isabelle Ardery, look into the victim's tangled domestic affairs. Fleming, in the middle of divorce proceedings, was supposed to have been in Greece; the woman renting the cottage is missing. Lynley and Havers find the patron's wayward daughter, Olivia, formerly a drug user and prostitute, who, now afflicted with ALS (Lou Gehrig's Disease--and Stephen Hawking's), is living on a barge with an animal-rights activist. Woven into the investigation are Olivia's accounts of her mother's relationship with the cricket star and of her own quest for her mother's love. Circumventing Ardery and using the media in a way discouraged by his superiors, Lynley puts his job in jeopardy. Although George's fluent prose is in full gear, the story fails to sustain momentum, sinking under the combined weight of superfluous detail and an overreaching psychological tone. (July)