A Banquet of Consequences

A Banquet of Consequences is one of the late Inspector Lynley novels and an unusually weighty one even by Elizabeth George's standards. The case begins with the suicide of a young man and widens to include his mother (a feminist celebrity-author), his sister (with a controlling fiancé and significant anorexia), and a long-running family history that the previous Lynley novels have only glanced at.

George commits to the family material with the patience the form rewards. Barbara Havers gets a particularly meaty subplot involving her diet and her relationship with her difficult neighbor (the long-running Khan family arc has been one of the series' best). Lynley is more peripheral in this entry than he usually is, which is appropriate for the case George is actually telling.

The closing chapters land hard. Four stars. A confident late-series Lynley.