written by Elizabeth George, you will surely find these lacking. Characters missing, character changes. Generally these series out of the U.K. are well acted and the scenery, of course, is lovely. But if you are a fan of the novels, you will not see the wonderful twisted plots Ms. George weaves.

Just watched the entire 3 series again for the 3rd time! A brilliant production, which I marked down 1 point only because of a certain inconsistency in quality of plot. Some episodes were truly stunning, and often in very atmospheric settings. Others were rather weaker.Overall stupendous acting, and a moving and compelling relationship between the two main characters. Their interplay alone makes the series worth watching. Both characters are utterly convincing and indeed inspiring as people. There are many duos as detectives, but this is one of the best.Having them detect all around the country is a tad unrealistic, but makes for a great variety of settings, which is fun.Very sorry they stopped it at 3 series. Surely Havers and Lynley would have got together at some stage!

I've just finished watching the whole series over a period of a month or so. This series is hard to rate, due to inconsistency -- not the actors' fault - the writing for these series is distinctly weird. It starts off as a pretty good series, then sometime around the middle or end of S2 it becomes distinctly bad, then for s3 and maybe early s4, almost too bad to watch, then it gets tolerably good again.I didn't mind the replacement of Helen, in fact I thought the last Helen was the best of the lot. If she had been Helen all along, the series would have been better IMHO.I haven't read the books and, given the horrible clichéd writing of many of the episodes that were based on the books, I am disinclined to.

Having seen the television version before reading the books, I can heartily recommend the video version over the print one. It takes liberties with stories, as any script-from-a-book would, but stays close to the characters. The chemistry between Lynley and Havers grows nicely, with a wall that will never go away that keeps any romantic entanglements out of the picture. As much as some might like to see that, it would ruin a really good friendship between unlikely people. The episodes are well shot, in beautiful locations, and constructed in a way that keeps you wondering how they're going to find their way to the end of this episode. The shame is that they were cancelled before being allowed to have one wrap-up episode. A good watch, but don't worry about reading the stories.