Eigentlich hat Inspector Lynley an jenem Abend Großes vor. Gerade will er Lady Helen einen Heiratsantrag machen, als ein Anruf aus dem Yard seine Pläne scheitern läßt. Im idyllischen Celandine Cottage in Kent hat der Milchmann nämlich statt der attraktiven Mieterin Gabriela Patten eine männliche Leiche vorgefunden. Der Vorfall wird noch rätselhafter, als die Ortspolizei den Toten identifiziert: Es ist niemand anderes als Kenneth Fleming, Englands gefeierter Cricket-Champion, der kurz vor dem wichtigsten Spiel seiner Karriere stand. Balld stellt sich heraus, daß alle Menschen um Kenneth Fleming seit Jahren in einem Netz aus verletzten Gefühlen, enttäuschten Hoffnungen und blindem Rachebedürfnis gefangen sind. Jeder und jede hat ein Motiv- und alle haben sie ein Alibi. Erst als Lynley seinen Job, ja sogar sein Leben riskiert, scheint es, als hätten selbst Mörder ein Gewissen.

Elizabeth George was born Susan Elizabeth George in Warren, Ohio. When she was eighteen months old, her family relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area where they lived in what's now part of Silicon Valley but was then the small town of Mountain View. There, she was educated at St. Joseph's Grammar School and Holy Cross High School by the Sisters of the Holy Cross.

She began her university education at Foothill Community College in Los Altos Hills, and from there she transferred to and graduated from the University of California in Riverside, California, picking up units along the way at UC Berkeley as well. She also attended California State University at Fullerton, where she was awarded a master's degree in Counseling/Psychology and UC Riverside again where she received a lifetime secondary teaching credential.

Professionally, she started out as a teacher. She was employed at Mater Dei High School in Santa Ana initially, but there she gave in to her bent for organized labor and was summarily fired along with ten other teachers for union activity. When the courts ordered the school to rehire all of the teachers, she was unavailable as she had quickly moved on to El Toro High School in El Toro, California (now called Lake Forest, California), where she remained for the rest of her career as high school English teacher. While employed there, she was selected Orange County Teacher of the Year, a tribute in part to the work she'd done with remedial students for nearly a decade. She left education after thirteen and a half years when she sold her first novel, A Great Deliverance, to her longtime publisher Bantam Books.

After eighteen months outside of the classroom, she returned to teaching at the community college level, where she taught creative writing at Coastline Community College for several years before the calls of her career as a writer made it too difficult for her to be at home for the eighteen-week periods that the Coastline course required of her. At that point, she branched out into teaching an intensive writing seminar that she offered first at the University of Oklahoma and, since then, at Book Passage in Corte Madera, California. She has also taught at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, at the University of California in Irvine, at Irvine Valley College, and through Edinboro University's summer program at Exeter College in Oxford University. She also teaches yearly at the Maui Writers' Retreat and she meets weekly with a group of unpublished writers in her home when she is in California.

She has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France's Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her novel A Great Deliverance, for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity Awards. She has also been awarded Germany's MIMI for her novel Well-Schooled in Murder.

Several of her novels have been filmed by for television by the BBC and have been broadcast in the US on PBS's MYSTERY.

Elizabeth George currently lives in Huntington Beach, California, making frequent trips to London where she has a flat in South Kensington. She has a very disobedient but nonetheless adorable longhaired dachshund named Titch as well as numerous friends of all ages and from all walks of life. 

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