A Place of Hiding is a solidly crafted novel by one of the queens of the traditional detective story, Elizabeth George. Someone killed millionaire Guy Brouard by slipping him a sedative and popping a stone in his throat and the Guernsey police have opted for a suspect who has, from their point of view, the advantage of being an American stranger. However, China has the good fortune of knowing English friends who are determined to see that justice is done, and who feel … mehrconsiderable loyalty to her and her brother Cherokee. Elizabeth George relies heavily on misdirection--there are almost too many suspects for this killing because Brouard was a games-player with a distinctly iffy set of personal habits and relatives. Not least among the plot strands is the whole question of Guernsey's occupation by the Germans in WW2; Brouard's involvement in a scheme to establish a Museum of Occupation precipitates an entirely different set of tragic events at a tangent to those surrounding his own death. This is a book impressively pervaded by vividly evoked places and by the legacies of history, both national and family; the eventual revelations about specific guilt and innocence are secondary, in a sense, to the implication that we are all involved, dangerously, in each other's lives. -- Roz Kaveney weniger