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.

I love Inspector Lynley (Nathaniel Parker). In this, the beginning of season 4, Lynley is trying to get Helen to talk to him. Long distance, of course. I can't figure out why those two got married. Maybe the actress who replaced Lesley Vickerage when she left the show due to pregnancy won't grate on me so much.In this episode, Havers has recovered from being shot at the end of season 3, and joins Lynley in investigating the shooting of a beautiful woman in a village. She turns out to have cheated on her husband with more than one man, so naturally they're suspects, along with the husband. However, a tragedy which occurred many years ago ties into the current murder, and it's up to Lynley and Havers to figure it out.This is a good mystery, with Lynley and Havers in fine form, with Lynley attempting to advise Havers on a windfall of money she is receiving due to her injury. He doesn't recommend a cruise.Entertaining.

I find this series very satisfying. It is character driven and has compelling dialog between Lynley and Sgt Havers. Havers is the real star of the show. She has very real problems in addition to working with her ponce of a boss. She lives paycheck to paycheck while caring for her parents, who suffer from dementia. How she juggles this situation with the need to be seconded to different locations to work on cases creates real angst in her character. In comparison, Lynley's problems are more social, as he frequently moralizes over dilemmas in his love life. Still, the rich detective and the hardscrabble sergeant work well with one another while solving cases that are twisty and intelligent. Like CSI, many of the cases are fashioned after recent cases in the news, so to say they are far fetched is not true. Try it out. You'll like the series.

The BBC Series is based on novels by Elizabeth George and original scripts. The stories are about two seemingly mismatched London detectives. He is the polished DI Thomas Lynley the eight Earl of Asherton, and his parter is Barbara Havers a sloppy, working class DS. His colleagues think he is a rich, spoiled, golden boy who is a detective as a hobby. She is thought to be difficult and unmanageable. Both have troubled home lives and both are overly dedicated to their jobs. They bicker and they fight, but all while a real respect grows.I really great series that has yet to get the respect it deserves from the BBC. It is fun to watch this partnership that was thrust upon them by their bosses (with the hopes of getting rid of both of them),click right from the beginning. If you watch it from the pilot "A Great Deliverance" to through to the most recent series, you can see the partners' relationship really develop nicely. In many ways they are more alike them different. Both use the job to avoid the problems in their personal lives. Some even argue that the actor have brought romantic chemistry to the TV show that is not in the books.Really worth seeing.