Playing for the Ashes

The death of a famous cricket player in a cottage fire, and the young woman who confessed to it, draw Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers into a case layered with passion, obsession, and long-maintained deception. Elizabeth George builds the seventh Inspector Lynley novel around the question of how far a person will go to protect what they love, and the investigation requires Lynley and Havers to operate in the uncomfortable terrain between duty and understanding.

Donada Peters narrates George's series with the literary seriousness the novels demand. Her performance captures the class and temperamental friction between Lynley and Havers while maintaining the emotional depth George brings to every character in the case. At nearly twenty-four hours, Playing for the Ashes is one of the longer entries in the series and one of the most rewarding, dense with psychological complexity that benefits from the sustained intimacy of audio.