Playing for the Ashes concerns the killing of a respected cricket star and the strange constellation of suspects directly or indirectly connected to him, including an estranged wife, an angry lover, a maternal philanthropist and her streetwalker daughter, an untrustworthy agent, and a network of animal-liberation activists. Lynley and Havers find, not surprisingly, that looking into a high-profile murder is a slow and hazardous venture; all the more so in In the Presence of the Enemy, a tense thriller about a kidnapped girl whose abductor demands that a powerful newspaper editor publicly confess he is the child's secret father. While Lynley searches for clues in London, Havers teams with an eager detective in a small town and is instantly uneasy about the latter's emotionally unbalanced mother and girlfriend. A Suitable Vengeance is set deep within the intrigues of Lynley's wealthy family. Havers shows up as a guest at her partner's Cornwall estate to help celebrate Lynley's wedding engagement, but is soon navigating old grudges between family members when Lynley's drug-addicted brother becomes a suspect in the death of a shopkeeper. Finally, Deception on His Mind strains Lynley and Havers's relationship a bit when the latter's investigation of the murder of a Pakistani man is called into question by an old chum. A harrowing climax leaves enough ethical and narrative ambiguity to make one yearn for more in the Lynley-Havers series. --Tom Keogh