Have just finished reading
"The Punishment She Deserves."
I think a lot of what transpires in this plot,
and it is a fiendishly tangled plot in places,
is about motherhood.
Virtually every woman who is a mother
is in for some sort of reckoning in the course of this plot.
Some of it breaks your heart.
When Elizabeth George does heartbreakingly sad, she does it with a vengeance.

As for Barbara Havers:
as she is nobody's mother,
and her unwell mother has been committed to institutional care,
all that she has to worry about is
all the other women practically trampling over her.
Lynley, after all, has her back, and she his --
even though their partnership is challenged as never before.

Lynley comes out of this one well;
his bosses at London HQ look worse than ever, though.

There is one final touch, at the very end,
which will make sense only to those readers who have read
the one with a death in Italy, what was it called?
I think it was "Just One Evil Act" or something close to it.