Stephanie Jones: Book Review - A Banquet of Consequences by Elizabeth George

Only the greediest of crime fiction aficionados could feel shortchanged by Elizabeth George, whose latest mystery, the majestically titled, 550-page A Banquet of Consequences, embroils her Metropolitan Police team of DI Thomas Lynley and DS Barbara Havers in the affairs of a family for which the word ‘dysfunctional’ could have been invented.

The endearingly eccentric Havers is not an exemplar of plum life skills herself, and her notoriety for her dress sense and eating habits – which resemble those of an unparented six-year-old with limitless pocket money – reaches beyond her peers to the office of the ‘guv’, Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, who is itching for an excuse to exile the boundary-busting Havers to a backwater hundreds of miles from London.

The only thing that terrifies Havers more than cooking is the thought of being cut off from proper police work, and loyal Lynley is caught between his regard and genuine need for Havers and the imperative to keep the peace with Ardery, with whom he had a brief affair.

Such is the backdrop of the primary plot, and it’s a good thing that George conjures emotional complexity with a very light hand; between the hopes and fears of the detectives and the chaotic lives of the victims and their loved ones, A Banquet of Consequences evokes Shakespeare in more than name, and the blows of the narrative land with the precision of a heavyweight’s punches.

Caroline Goldacre is the figure at the core of an investigation that swells to include her son Will, who committed suicide three years earlier, and Clare Abbott, a successful feminist writer whose sudden death Rory Statham, Clare’s friend and editor, pesters Havers into accurately diagnosing as murder by poison. Caroline was Clare’s assistant nonpareil, having boundless time to dedicate since her second marriage to Alastair MacKerron, a devoted stepfather to her boys since they were small, weakened to the point of extinction in the wake of Will’s death.

A fulsome group of abettors to the story consists of Lily, Will’s ex-girlfriend, whose hatred of Caroline is expressed with unveiled menace; Caroline’s other son Charlie and his estranged wife, India; Alastair and his new paramour, Sharon; and, for comic relief, Dorothea Harriman, a well-groomed and efficient Met administrator who makes Havers’ personal grooming and love life her special project.

The story proper belongs to Havers, who circles the enigmatic Caroline like a shark, summoning reserves of patience heretofore unknown as she puts the pieces together, fraught but never defeated, even when she’s on a final, 24-hour deadline: “It was absolute murder to be desperate for something without knowing what that something was.” George, like all the best crime writers, likes to place her investigators in front of a brick wall, with no hope of going over, under or around, then afford her reader the pleasure of observing the conquest.

George’s magic touch is best illuminated in Caroline, who begins as a woman undone by the death of her child and shape-shifts, literally and figuratively, over the course of the novel. She symbolizes the story’s themes – the ebb and flow of love, professional jealousy, the dangers of pity – and the abyss that opens when perhaps the strongest of human emotions, mother love, rejects all boundaries. The feast of regret that follows her actions makes A Banquet of Consequences one of the not-to-be-missed crime novels of the year.