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In the Presence of the Enemy

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In the Presence of the Enemy

By: Elizabeth George
Narrated by: Donada Peters
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About this listen

 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers must navigate fraught politics and explosive secrets in this “rich [and] addictively readable” mystery in the renowned Inspector Lynley series.

Don’t miss the upcoming BritBox streaming series Lynley!

“Combining the eloquence of P.D. James with a story John Grisham would envy, George serves up a splendid, unsettling novel.”—People

Hailed as the “king of sleaze,” tabloid editor Dennis Luxford is very good at ferreting out the sins and scandals of people in exposed positions. But when he opens an innocuous-looking letter addressed to him, he discovers that someone else excels at it as well. Ten-year-old Charlotte Bowen has been abducted, and if Luxford does not admit publicly to having fathered her, she will die.

But Charlotte’s existence is Luxford’s most fiercely guarded secret, and acknowledging her will throw more than one life in chaos. For Charlotte’s mother, Eve, is one of England’s most high-profile Junior Ministers and quite possibly the next Margaret Thatcher. Eve refuses to let Luxford damage her career by printing the story or calling the police.

As Luxford struggles to find help, another tragedy brings Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and Sergeant Barbara Havers into the case—one whose tentacles reach from London to the countryside—as the investigators navigate a world of corrupt self-interest in which the sins of parents are visited upon children. Crime Thrillers Mystery Police Procedural Psychological Suspense Thriller Thriller & Suspense Traditional Detectives Espionage Fiction Crime Disappearance England

Critic reviews

“Combining the eloquence of P.D. James with a story John Grisham would envy, George serves up a splendid, unsettling novel.”— People

“Elizabeth George reigns as queen of the mystery genre. . . . The Lynley books constitute the smartest, most gratifyingly complex and impassioned mystery series now being published.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Rich . . . and addictively readable . . . elegant and unsettling, classy and caustic . . . [a] page-turner with unusual breadth and generous depth.”—USA Today

“Elizabeth George only gets better . . . another superb British mystery.”—Daily News, New York

“A masterpiece.”—Winston-Salem Journal

“Tough, breathtaking.”—Cosmopolitan

“A dazzler.”—The New Yorker
All stars
Most relevant
A great story really well read. But sadly Winston Nkata is NOT South African, which made his every appearance very distracting.

Very misguided accents

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I have only recently been introduced to Elizabeth George and the Lynley and Havers duo. Great story telling and the narrator is excellent. I have needed to purchase books of some of the series as audible don't have the full collection and I can't think why.

why haven't audible got all the lynley book s

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intricate n compelling but also easy to read. would highly recommend. I live ALL of her books

excellent

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Good story didn’t see the last bit coming. But the reader needs to sort her accents out. The music teachers veered from Scottish to Liverpudlian to the oddest Northern Irish.

Good story

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I found the storytelling to be entirely hampered by the peculiar accents of the voice actor. She’s fine when it comes to doing a generic well-spoken English accent but any deviation from this swings between embarrassing efforts at regional UK accents to the frankly tone deaf Afrikaans accent of Afro-British character Winston Nkata.

Good story, poor narration

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