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Elizabeth George fails big time Reading this novel reminds me of how I felt watching Michael Jordan play baseball. I respected the emotions that were driving him, and he did an OK job at it, but I just wanted him to get it out of his system already and go back to basketball, which he played like no one else on earth. Like an angel. In With No One as Witness, Elizabeth George inflicts on us her restlessness with the world she so brilliantly created over the past 17 years. Instead of her gorgeously-plotted and intimate tales of normal people driven to murder, she strikes out into the territory of serial killers. It's a mistake. In the past, she's developed villains who linger in our memory for the richness of their characters and the awful logic that drives them to commit murder. But for the grace of God, any of us might be Robin Payne (In the Presence of the Enemy) or Sarah Gordon (For the Sake of Elena). In this book, she provides a serial killer, whose character verges on a parody of serial killers; a host of secondary characters who's motives are perplexing; and an inattention to versimilitude that is highly annoying and most unlike George. Oh, and she also stuffs the book with weighty themes including racism, child pornography, and the evils of tabliod journalism. But my real beef with this novel isn't that she branches off into an area that she handles less well: any author of a long-running series is bound to run out of ideas sometimes. And there's a long and honorable tradition of authors of one genre flexing their creative muscles in another area â€" think of beloved crime writer P.D. James and her foray into science fiction (The Children of Men). But P.D. James was smart: when she wanted to branch out, she let her main series take a rest and created a whole different cast of characters for her attempt at science fiction. My real beef is that, unlike James, George is trying her hand at serial killing within the context of her long-running series, and the real victim seems to be the series itself. In the last chapters she kills off an essential character (but not by the serial killer) in a way that is so implausible that I'm left feeling that she wrote this book on a Bad Plot Day. If you want to read about serial killers, find an author who's better at portraying this kind of evil. If you want to keep reading about the continuing growth of Tommy, Helen, Simon, Deborah, and Barbara, cross your fingers that this was just an unfortunate experiment for this formerly fine author. Come back, Elizabeth. We love you.