Product Description

The brutal, inexplicable death of Inspector Thomas Lynley's wife has left Scotland Yard shocked and searching for answers. Even more horrifying is that the trigger was apparently pulled by a twelve-year-old boy. What were the circumstances that led to his final act of desperation? That story begins on the other side of London in rough North Kensington, where the virtually orphaned Campbell children are bounced from home to home. Fifteen-year-old Ness is headed for trouble as fast as her high-heeled boots will take her. Middle child Joel cares for the youngest, Toby, but something clearly isn't right with Toby. Before long, a local gang starts harassing Joel and threatening his brother. To protect his family, Joel ends up making a pact with the devil—a move that leads straight to the front doorstep of Thomas Lynley. The anatomy of a murder, the story of a family in crisis, What Came Before He Shot Her is a powerful and emotional novel, full of deep psychological insights, that only the incomparable Elizabeth George could write.

Performed by Charles Keating

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #341477 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-01
• Released on: 2006-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 560 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Bestseller George (With No One as Witness) departs from the usual investigative nuts and bolts of her Thomas Lynley and Barbara Havers mystery thrillers with this searing examination of the lives of one horribly dysfunctional family and their immigrant London milieu. Switching uncomfortably at times from dialogue in a rough patois to exposition in a language both formal and sociological, George delivers a stinging indictment of a society unable to respond effectively to the needs of its poorer citizens. Kendra Osborne, a 40-year-old woman with modest ambitions and plans to achieve them, has no idea how to cope when her mother "dumps" her sister's three children on her doorstep and heads for Jamaica. Fifteen-year-old Ness, 11-year-old Joel and seven-year-old Toby each have a wealth of problems exacerbated by their mixed-race heritage. It's no accident that George refers to Dickens on the first page of this earnest but perhaps overly didactic novel, which focuses on the burdens borne by Joel as he's swept by forces he can neither understand nor control into a fatal encounter. 8-city author tour. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Scotland Yard detective Thomas Lynley is all but missing from this novel, and critics aren't sure what to make of his absence as well as that of most of the other popular series characters (only two of Lynley's police sidekicks appear—as minor walk-ons). The majority of critics cite this psychological crime novel as a deeply disturbing and unrelenting, yet illuminating, portrayal of a dysfunctional family and of the ways its members can go tragically astray. Two reviewers, however, cited a disconnected narrative, an overly complicated plot, too much detail, and a bleak, hopeless tone as major faults of the novel. There are, of course, no surprises about how the novel ends: Elizabeth George has already told that story in With No One As Witness.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

From Booklist
Fans of George's popular Inspector Lynley series were stunned by the brutal slaying of the Scotland Yard detective's wife in With No One as Witness (2005). Her new novel unveils the events leading up to this bold, bloody event (though Lynley himself is conspicuously absent). Life is traumatic for mixed-race siblings Joel, Ness, and Toby Campbell. With their father murdered in the street and their mother in a mental institution, the trio is left in the care of Aunt Kendra, a twice-divorced fortysomething with the will but not the wherewithal to raise three kids. Teenager Ness and 12-year-old Joel do their best to cope with their new life in London's often-menacing neighborhood of North Kensington. Ness ditches school, does drugs, and becomes romantically entangled with Blade, a nefarious local drug dealer with a cobra tattoo on his cheek. Joel strives to keep the peace in a precarious domestic situation; he watches out for his younger brother, Toby, whose odd appearance and slow wit make him a frequent target of cruel peers. After numerous run-ins with the law, Ness is assigned to a promising community service project. Meanwhile, Joel seals his fate by bravely defending his brother and sister from a bloodthirsty young thug. George deftly depicts the palaver and predicaments of middle- and working-class Brits in this dark, chilling tale of desperation and revenge. Allison Block
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

So disappointed...
(Some minor spoilers may be discussed) I've been a huge longtime fan of EG. I've been to her readings and have always respected her as a writer and a person. But I was sorely disappointed with this book. Sure, I'm a huge Lynley fan and would've preferred to see her continue the series without a break to try a new kind of genre. But I can appreciate that authors sometimes like to have projects like these.

That said, this book just didn't work. George is a great mystery writer - give us a killer, a whodonit, etc. and run with it. I also LOVE her character development... but the characters I care about are people like Tommy and Simon and all those who we've gotten to know through the series. I had a really tough time caring about the characters in this story. For a while, I felt like I knew Joel, but then never got a feel for the rest of them. What the heck was wrong with Toby specifically? Did Ness ever get what she wanted? I know writers like to be vague, but after a while I just didn't care.

I was extremely tempted to just stop reading, but I hate doing that. I like to see something through. So I did, and I was supremely disappointed. I kept thinking Lynley or someone would appear midway through the book and tie some of it together with Helen's death. I held on, even flipped through randomly to see if I could see hints of their names. But nope, nada, nothing. Had they worked some of our favorite characters into the plotline, I'd have been fine. Most of her books balance a mystery with character development.

But this book was chapter after chapter after chapter of boring. Stories of bullies, of sadness in a neighborhood, broken dreams (or no dreams). I just frankly didn't care after a while. It was like she wrote the same chapter over and over again with little development. Dix and Kendra never really seemed to develop much, and neither did the kids' history. I wanted to know more about that, since it was the only mystery to the whole thing.

We all knew Joel was going to end up involved in the murder - and sometimes that can make for a good mystery, to see what happens leading up to it. But that only works for stories where you see things like how the murder played out. With this, it just was Joel's boring backstory for 500-plus pages.

I understand EG had to kill off Helen. Fine. But at least make the next book about how everyone dealt with her murder, as well as developing a new case. I felt like this was falsely advertised since it did mention Lynley on the cover jacket, too, and there wasn't a single mention of him.

I love EG, and can't wait for her next MYSTERY. But even loyal fans could pass on this one and not be missing a thing.

BEWARE Lynley & Havers fans - they aren't in this book! Don't buy it!
How could Elizabeth George even think of letting her fans down like this? I've never before been moved to write a review but this book is a literary crime that cannot go unpunished! (Wish it had gone unpublished though.) Ever since I read George's first Lynley mystery, I've bought each subsequent new one as it was released. I've never been disappointed - until now. That's not to say I don't have some gripes with George; I do. For one, she's long-winded and seems to get more so with every passing book. Readers don't need a description of every locale on a given London road to believe that the author, self-consciously and insurmountably American, has been there. More irritatingly though, and no doubt stemming from the same self-consciousness, her overuse of Brit vernacular and colloquialisms is forced and rings false compared with true British writers, who have no need to prove where they are from. But to her credit, she has created a cast of winning characters and I tune in every time to see what has happened in Lynley's and Havers' worlds. Especially after the last book shockingly killed off a major character, we deserved to be rewarded for waiting and plunking down our money. I want to know how Lynley is coping with the death of his wife, and what is happening with emotionally-scarred Deborah, who was first on the crime scene? And what about Barbara Havers, the character with whose creation George struck pure gold? Both Havers' professional and private lives are utterly engaging ongoing sagas (when will she get together with that neighbor of hers?) and I feel completely ROBBED not to have received the next installment. Worse yet is the book itself, which I dumped after a tedious first chapter (and after I flipped through the rest of it thinking I could find the parts with Lynley et al. Trust me, they aren't there). George's attempt to write completely outside her milieu and misleadingly foist it on her loyal mystery-reading public strikes me as pretentious and patronizing - towards both the subject and the audience. She is off my "authors to trust for a good read" list. True British mystery lovers, wondering what to read now, might try Kate Atkinson's "Case Histories" and "One Good Turn" for superb writing and storytelling. The latter, her newly published sequel about detective Jackson Brodie, kept me up all night, entertained and awed. If only Ms. George's latest had done the same.

A worthy writing experiment that strays from traditional crime-solving formulas
"A wanton act of destruction" --- no, not a murder as such, but the way one of Elizabeth George's outraged readers described the unhappy ending of WITH NO ONE AS WITNESS, her second-to-last book: Helen, the adored pregnant wife of George's policeman hero, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, is gunned down on the doorstep of her London house. Mystery lovers are often habituated to tidy, let-justice-be-done denouements; sacrificing Lynley's nearest and dearest evidently violated some unspoken taboo.

When Arthur Conan Doyle killed off Sherlock Holmes (he was weary of turning out stories about the eccentric detective), his admirers were so upset that he had to bring Holmes back from the dead. George, in contrast, doesn't seem inclined to appease her fans: Instead, she takes an even bigger chance in her new book, WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER, telling the story behind Mrs. Lynley's murder.

The apparent culprit is 12-year-old Joel Campbell, a mixed-race boy from North Kensington --- a neighborhood where the police are not heroes but enemies; where gangs rule, drugs and sexual violence are endemic, and there is a constant struggle to survive. Joel and his two siblings --- Vanessa, his older, troubled sister, and Toby, a boy who seems to live in his own private world --- are all but orphaned (their father is dead, their mother in a psychiatric hospital; they've been abandoned by their grandmother and fobbed off on an aunt). Caught between painful memories of a one-time happy childhood and the perils of their current existence, they lurch helplessly down the road to disaster. Lynley, by the way, does not even appear in the book, and his police sidekicks, Barbara Havers and Winston Nkata, have only a walk-on --- another probable source of distress for George's devotees.

WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER is a gamble in two senses. George not only diverges from the traditional crime-solving formula, she is also a white, well-heeled American presuming to get inside the lives and heads of black, struggling Londoners. No matter how well intentioned, this effort will certainly be seen by some people as patronizing rather than courageous.

Racial politics aside, the book reminds me strongly of the nineteenth-century English social novels in which middle-class authors addressed the evils of early industrial slums and factories. Like Benjamin Disraeli's SYBIL, it emphasizes that rich and poor, although they ostensibly live in the same city, are really "two nations." (When Joel ventures into Belgravia, the elegant neighborhood where the Lynleys live, it is a world so alien it might as well be the North Pole.) Like Dickens's books, it is narrated by a lofty omniscient voice and features a large cast of characters. Striving, upwardly mobile Kendra Osborne, the children's aunt, is trying to establish a massage practice, and her boyfriend, Dix, is a prize-winning bodybuilder. Teenaged Vanessa is a furious victim of sexual abuse. There are Dickensian villains, too, evil geniuses of the street who take pleasure in manipulating and torturing boys like Joel and Toby. The do-gooders --- social workers, writing teachers, mentors --- are mostly white and usually impotent, foreigners who don't really know the language of the neighborhood or its people.

Speaking of language, the dialogue in this book is largely in the black argot of London. There is a point to this --- time and again George emphasizes that educated people like Kendra are perfectly adept at standard English (what the kids call her "Lady Muck" voice) and can pull it out on appropriate occasions (as when talking to the authorities). Thus the see-sawing between slangy and refined accents comes to represent a tension that dominates the whole book: the choice between sticking with the lousy deal that fate has handed you and trying to escape into a better, less limited existence. But the dialect gets to be a bit much after a while --- I felt as if I were listening to a minstrel show. George's decision to reproduce the vernacular may be phonetically accurate, but I'm not sure that it serves her book well.

The novel is absorbing, albeit overlong. The characters are engaging and poignant; you want to protect them, prevent their descent into crime, peril, loss of dignity and selfhood. In crossing class and racial lines, George is doing something most genre writers wouldn't: setting out to expose the ugly underside of offenses so politely solved in the usual English mystery. This is a more realistic book than the usual thriller insofar as it recognizes that most crimes originate in problematic socioeconomic conditions ("[T]here were forces at work far larger than the Campbell children or their aunt, making North Kensington a place unsafe for harbouring or advancing dreams") and it has no detective hero to hand the reader a neat explanation-cum-solution.

But I'm not sure we read mysteries for a picture of society as it really is. I think we read them for reassurance: Their conventions make us feel that crimes aren't just random acts but possess some logic, and that those who commit them can be unmasked and punished. And I missed Lynley and (especially) Havers. Part of the pleasure of a series is encountering familiar people, in particular the guiding presence of brilliant crime-solvers who give shape to the story and balance to the moral scales. Although I respect George for challenging herself and her readers, WHAT CAME BEFORE HE SHOT HER is more a worthy experiment than a successful mystery.

Still, I appreciate a writer who surprises me rather than banks on the same bestselling blueprint. What in heaven's name will Elizabeth George do next? Your guess is as good as mine.

--- Reviewed by Kathy Weissman