CARELESS IN RED by Elizabeth George – finished reading on April 29, 2023We are in the sea and surfing milieu, researched, well painted.But I give this novel three stars because there really needs to be character editing in this number 15 of the series. Granted, numerous characters populate the Lynley mysteries and a list of them at the beginning of each novel would help, for it takes an earnest effort of memory to remember who is whom, they end up making sense in George’s universe. Well, not here. Although I love the way Careless in Red begins, with Lynley so desperate after the death of his wife he ends up leaving and crossing the land on foot, with nothing, not even clothes change or an ID, living and looking like a homeless after weeks of endless walking. The contrast between the aristocrat and the miserable is astounding, yet moving and effective.But here is where the problem starts. The first person he encounters after finding a body on the beach is Daidre, a zoo veterinarian, whose house he breaks into in order to find a phone and call the police. But what seems a promising character ends up being an annoying one. At the beginning a suspect, her secrets end up being irrelevant, if not stupid, and her judgement of Lynley, immature. Lynley is as silly in the scenes where he is alone with her. When Daidre reproaches Lynley to act more like a detective than a friend (or more), what does she expect? Although he has handed his resignation to the New Scotland Yard, Lynley cannot remove his years of cop reflexes, especially when the woman he faces lives steps away from a murder scene. When she understands this, it’s out of the blue. Also, the fact that a veterinarian who treats zoo animals as well as the pig of a friend is bothered by the smell of a detective made vagabond by chagrin, this fact stuns me. In my imagination, I am bothered by his smell and can’t wait until he takes a shower, but she shouldn’t be. The fact that a nascent romance (when Lynley gets cleaned up, of course) is suggested troubles me as a reader, since George has insisted on the man’s profound love for Helen all along her novels. If upper class Helen has frustrated readers with her snobbish and frivolous manners, I’ll take her over Daidre who seems to come out of the worst of Victor Hugo’s sentimentality. She seems to burst out from his Les Misérables and, like V.H.’s novel, should be recycled into some sort of musical, where roughly drawn characters are colored by music. A guignol show in Central Park would do as well. I’d have one of the marionettes beat her up for being so dumb.Worthy of reading are the surfing descriptions and details, the “rustics,” with the light thrown on two elder men meeting daily at the local bar (one of them is not that rustic, as we’ll find out). The grandpa and his relationship with granddaughter Tammy illustrate George’s psychological insight. But the nymphomaniac in the lot is a cruel, stick figure and I do wonder why her husband puts up with her. Hubby is as much a stick figure as she is, the perfect masochist, ignorant for years of the needs of his children who want her out of their world.Entertaining but defective, it’s the settings descriptions and the background characters that keep the novel solid enough. But it lacks the depth we expect from Elizabeth George, standing the way it can like a surfer apprehending the next wave.