All the Time in the World

I may have to mark this one "will not finish" rather than "on hold." Can we say "false advertising"? The dust jacket implies that this book is part of the Inspector Lynley series, and I suppose it is, in a very peripheral way, but about a third of the way into it, having had nary a mention of any of the usual cast of those books, I flipped forward and found that apparently Lynley et al do not feature in it until perhaps the last few pages, when their lives collide with that of the main character.

WCBHSH is the story of a pre-teen British boy, his siblings (one older, one younger), and their aunt, upon whom the children have been dumped by their grandmother on her way out of the country, as she emigrated to Jamaica. The twice-divorced, childless aunt is ill-equipped to handle three kids, the oldest of whom is a willful young woman headed for trouble; the developmental problems of the younger boy make him a target for predators and force the older one into the role of caretaker and protector. Their mentally-ill mother is institutionalized and unlikely to return to her parental duties any time soon, and their father is dead.

A lot of pages are spent laying the ground for this misbegotten little family unit to go inevitably, badly wrong, and to be honest, the fairly predictable story Ms. George was setting out didn't hold my interest enough to slog through another 350 pages or so.