A Great Deliverance by Elizabeth George

The Village was surrounded by woods, by the upward slope of meadow, by the feeling of absolute security and peace.  Once St. Catherine's bells ceased ringing, the birds took up, tittering from rooftops and trees.  Somewhere, a fire had been lit and woodsmoke, just the ghost of its fragrance, was like a whisper in the air.  It was hard to believe that three weeks past, a mile from out of town, a man had been decapitated by his only daughter.                                                                                                   -- Elizabeth George, A Great Deliverance (Bantam, 1988)

This is the first (of 21 so far) of George's series of detective novels about Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley and his partner Dective Sergeant Barbara Havers of Soctland Yard, as well as Lynley's girlfriend Helen Clyde, forensic scientist Simon St. James and his wife Deborah (who was once Lynley's lover).  It's 400 pages long and somwhat unusual in the genre, first of all because the murderer is not in doubt and, secondly, George devotes an unusual amount of time to the private lives of the detectives and their personal responses to the criminal behavior they investigate.  George writes well, with a precise vocabulary and intense psychological insight into all the characters of the small town of Keldale, starting with the priest who brings the case to Scotland Yard.  As an American George is fascinated by the class divides in England, contrasting the upper-class Lynley with the working-class Havers as well as the insular town of Keldale with cosmopolitan London.