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A Traitor to Memory
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A Traitor to Memory
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A Traitor to Memory
Audiobook (abridged)5 hours

A Traitor to Memory

Written by Elizabeth George

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

When Eugenie Davies is killed by a driver on a quiet London street, her death is clearly no accident. Someone struck her with a car and then deliberately ran over her body before driving off, leaving nothing behind but questions.

What brought Eugenie Davies to London on a rainy autumn night? Why was she carrying the name of the man who found her body? Who among the many acquaintances in her complicated and tragic life could have wanted her dead? And could her murder have some connection to a twenty-eight-year-old musical wunderkind, a virtuoso violinist who several months earlier suddenly and inexplicably lost the ability to play a single note?

For Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, whose own domestic life is about to change radically, these questions are only the first in an investigation that leads him to walk a fine line between personal loyalty and professional honor.

Assigned to the case by his superior, Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Lynley learns that Webberly's first murder investigation as a DI over twenty years ago involved Eugenie Davies and a sensational criminal trial. Yet what is truly damaging is what Webberly already knows and no doubt wants Lynley to keep concealed.

Now the pressure is on Lynley to find Eugenie Davies' killer. For not only is he putting his own career into jeopardy, but he is also attempting to safeguard the careers of his longtime partners Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata. Together, they must untangle the dark secrets and darker passions of a family whose history conceals the truth behind a horrific crime.


From the Hardcover edition.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 26, 2001
ISBN9780553755152
Unavailable
A Traitor to Memory

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Reviews for A Traitor to Memory

Rating: 3.610070205620609 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

427 ratings15 reviews

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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This book went on forever! I had long since worked out who did it as well and I just didn't find the very final ending scene believable (I won't spoil it for you just in case you do get there....)Not my favourite George novel and I'll be skipping it if I reread.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I finally gave up on this book. More than half way through and I just couldn't take it anymore. Figured out who did it long ago, but just kept slogging through. I love long books, but this was just too much.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    A convoluted mystery told in a convoluted way.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another Inspector Lynley novel. The mother of a violin prodigy is killed by a hit-and-run driver, and the mystery gets more and more complicated the more it is investigated. I did get a bit tired by Gideon's (the violin player) constant whining, but it all has a purpose. He has apparently lost the ability to play, and through a psychiatrist, begins remembering his childhood and the murder of his sister, something that plays hugely in the current murder investigation. I wasn't hugely surprised by the ending, but I was kept guessing through much of the book.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Gideon, a smart young boy, with great musical talent has lost his abilities. Two or three hit-and- run murders happen and detectives are baffled as to who committed them. The plot revolves around the murder/death of Gideon's little sister several years prior. This sister had down syndrome. The ending indicates that the father committed the murders trying to hide the cover-up the earlier murder of his child.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This one was harder for me to read of her books. There was no resolution in the end, not that there really could be, but it was emotionally draining. I also found the format - switching between the narrative and the diary distracting.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I did not enjoy this book at all and if I had had anything else to read I would have given it up as a bad job - as it was I slogged through to the end and promised myself never to read another one of her books.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    When I first started reading this book and realized the density and detail of the prose, I reset my expectations that it was a regular police procedural and put it in the category of a literary mystery a la Peter May. To make it a story that had a central mystery to solve, but would be primarily about the victims or the people close to the victims. I even though it might be more about the investigators, but that didn’t happen as much. At first, this approach worked and I got to the halfway point before I started to lose patience. I didn’t skim, at least not much (Gideon’s damn dream descriptions did me in though!). Reading some earlier reviews of the book, it is unusually long for George and for this series, so I’ll probably read more of them. I liked how she wrote and the complexity of the crime (although I did peg Sonia’s murderer early on).So yeah, it is very long, somewhat repetitive and there are a lot of characters to keep up with, but I liked it and there were some gems in there like this one - “We grind against each other, then, which is probably the way it happens when a man and a woman are trying to preserve a connection that’s already been severed. And in that grinding, we wear each other away until what we had is so distant a memory that we can no longer sift through the discord of our present to locate the harmony that defined our past. And it ends.”
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A Traitor to Memory. Elizabeth George.2001. My reward to myself for finishing The Red Horse, was to read the next Elizabeth George novel, and I loved it! Lynley and Havers are trying to discover the reason behind a series of hit-and-run accidents. The victims are connected to a violin prodigy, Gideon Davies, and the connections go back 25 years to the murder of Gideon’s baby sister. As usual, there are numerous suspects one of which is Lynley’s superior which adds to the tension of the plot. In addition to the case, Lynley is worried about Helen who is now pregnant and both of them are concerned about how Deborah will take this news. I always want Helen, Deborah, and St. James to have bigger parts in the plot than they do. Vintage Elizabeth George!!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A detailed British mystery centering around the family of a violin protegy. I found it a satisfying read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Beautifully convoluted mystery delving into the roots of a violin genius' sudden inability to play. The story is structured around the diary of the blocked genius as he digs through his history for the psychiatrist. Plot strands take the reader into murder, which of course involves Detective Inspector Lynley and Barbara Havers duo, so beloved by her fans. Fascinating study of the impact of exceptional talent on the rest of the family.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    #17-2011A Traitor to MemoryElizabeth George2001719 pages½ /5 starsWhat do you call a book with too many characters and of those characters only the two regulars in this series are enjoyable yet receive little print time while the rest are not likeable nor sincere nor whom the reader can sympathize? What do you call a novel that is utterly confusing in that the storyline shifts from memories to journals to character’s real time actions? What do you call 719 wordy pages that leave you scratching your head and mumbling to yourself? What do you call a tome which you began reading ten years ago and abandoned based on the above characteristics but wanted to pick up again and determine if it redeems itself? Finally, what do you call a book that is a complete waste of time and dead trees……………….I call it A Traitor to Memory. It’s a shame that this novel did not meet the expectations of George’s previously much enjoyed novel, In the Pursuit of the Proper Sinner.Would I recommend it…………..No, but I certainly would not write off Elizabeth George. She is a masterful writer but the length of this labyrinth should have been addressed in the editing room.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gideon Davies, a former child prodigy violinist, has lost his art, due, presumably, to “psychogenic amnesia” (an amnesia not due to any physical process but one of purely psychological origins). Through chapters that are meant to be entries in a diary kept at the behest of his psychologist, Davies tries to work out just what exactly he is trying to forget. His current boarder, Libby Neale, tries to help him, and perhaps be more to him than just a tenant. Meanwhile, in a totally different time zone, Scotland Yard Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Constable Barbara Havers try to solve a series of hit-and-run murders. The hit-and-run victims include people from Gideon’s past; in particular, those who were in his life at the time of the drowning death of his retarded sister Sonia twenty years earlier. Thus the two parallel stories involve the same people, but the Scotland Yard chapters predate the diary entries, a trope which is not at all clear at first, and can be rather confusing.Familiar characters from George’s previous novels make an appearance, including the likable Detective Winston Nkata, the Superintendent Malcolm Webberly, Lynley’s wife Helen, and Lynley’s close friend and forensic scientist Simon Allcourt-St. James and his wife Deborah.The erstwhile friends and family of Gideon Davies are given enough of a psychological vetting in Gideon’s diaries to show that this prodigy has spent his life surrounded by some very bizarre people, who in turn have made him very bizarre as well. He is still, at age 28, a spoiled boy who thinks everyone’s life should revolve around him. Contributing to this perception is his father Richard Davies, who will make any sacrifice for his son, even in preference to his young pregnant lover Jill Foster. Like other George mysteries, we must look back to the epigraph to get her sense of the message of the book, which in this case is a quote from II Samuel: “O my son Absalom, My son, my son, Absalom! Would God I had died for thee.” The son in this case is of course Gideon, and the father, involved in his son’s life to a pathological degree, is Richard Davies. If Gideon and Richard aren’t very likeable, neither are the others who have been with them over the years. His mother, Eugenie, deserted the family after Sonia died. His sister’s former nanny Katya has just been released from twenty years in prison for killing Sonia and now divides her time sneaking between two female lovers met in prison. His former house co-boarder is an internet sex addict who now goes by the handle TongueMan. And so it goes. George engages us with the usual stockpile of family secrets and plot twists and turns, but the endless self-absorption of such a central character as Gideon was a bit wearing. Our old Scotland Yard friends from her previous mysteries had to play “second fiddle” in this story to the bratty violinist. The chronological dislocution only made it harder to bear. (JAF)
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I used to be a huge fan, but this book was hard work. The story dragged on endlessly and did ultimately not amount to much. I did not like the Gideon entries and evntually started just to skip them. With half as many pages it would probably have been a good book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Reading this novel is like unwinding a many colored ball of yarn. George sets the story up with a hit and run, and unfortunately that character happens to be one I’d like to have known better, but she leaves us in the first 5 pages. Having never read George before, I had difficulty with a lack of familiarity with any of the detectives who pursue the crimes, who all come into focus as the story gains momentum. I suspect from reading this novel that these are characters who evolve over time in previous books. But initially, I had to work at keeping the characters identified. The plotting is skillful and any mystery reader can’t help but to be drawn into the story. The characters are well developed and bring flavor and color to the pages. The problem which comes into play with this novel is length .. by the time I’d turned almost 500 pages, I found myself counting how many were left. I don’t think a mystery sustains itself well over that many pages, no matter how intricately drawn. A doorstop size of 1024 pages, and at the mid way point, I began to get mired down. I think this story could have been told in half that many pages and given George’s skill with characterization and plotting, you still would have had a great mystery to bite into. Made me wonder where her editors were when this manuscript was handed in.