Neither time nor patience.

Frustration, thy name is Elizabeth George. With her lush writing, English settings, a complicated lead character with an abrasive partner and thorny mysteries, I should be devouring all of her mysteries. Instead, I find myself picking up her books with the anxious hope that I won't have to force myself through to the conclusion, just to find out who commited the crime.

Okay, perhaps we ought to begin at the beginning. Elizabeth George is best known as the author of the Inspector Thomas Lynley mysteries, a series that, since A Great Deliverance was published in 1988, has grown to 14 titles. A perennial best-seller, the Lynley mysteries have gotten a boost since 2002, when Mystery! began airing its own series based on the books. After I saw and thoroughly enjoyed the series, I turned to the books.

George bases her mysteries in the conflicts in and around her central investigator, D.I. Thomas Lynley of Scotland Yard, who also happens to be the eighth Earl of Asherton. Uncomfortable with his status, yet unable to escape his own sense of duty afforded by his priviledged birth, Lynley is a study of inner turmoil, bordering on angst. Lynley's foil is his working class partner, Barbara Havers, stubborn and headstrong, yet with vulnerabilities of her own that she hides behind a shell so thick that she doesn't even acknowledge it to herself. This pairing gives George enough material to work with to drive multidimentioned mysteries full of ethical and moral dilemmas.

When George sticks to the conflict between Lynley and Havers and the issues immediately surrounding the mystery at hand, her formula works--even for the 400 or so pages that most of her mysteries run. But too often, George turns to outside characters that are often only connected to the plot by the thinnest of threads (and usually turn out to be annoying to boot). Along with an unfortunate tendency towards the melodramatic, George's novels sometimes come off as bloated soap operas.

Without all the window dressing and emoting, George's mysteries at their core are tightly constructed crimes, without any clear-cut moral answers. The last of her books I read, Missing Joseph, had all sort of juicy moral dilemmas that remained unsolved at the conclusion. But I had to slog through 400 pages before the mystery actually took center stage. Until George returns to focus on her central characters, I won't be continuing with this series.