Series: Adam Dalgliesh
by Author P.D. James
The Murder Room (2004)
A reasonable enough mystery, but not top-notch, and with a very contrived feel. What are the chances that an innocent motorist leaving the scene of a copy-cat crime would just happen to say the exact same words that the murderer in the original crime did? The whole book has a similar air of unrea...
Shroud for a Nightingale (2001)
At several points the main character is discussing the case with his assistant and, despite the fact they've already talked about the evidence and what they think and he's the current viewpoint character and we follow both of them through everything important they do, their important deductions a...
Death in Holy Orders (2002)
Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard has been asked by Sir Alred Treeves to take a closer look into the suspicious death of his adopted son Ronald, who suffocated under the cliffs near St. Anselms by an avalanche of sand. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? Dalgliesh, the son of a re...
A Certain Justice (2006)
Please, somebody tell me that this is the worst book written by P. D. James, because if it isn't then people are even more gullible than I think. A scene can be handled sparely, as here, "I drove to the store and got the evening paper," or it can be given in pages of detail, describing the need f...
Devices and Desires (2002)
Every time I read a P. D. James novel, I wonder why I don't read them more often. They are the reading equivalent of luxuriating in a deep, soft, pillow-top bed and eating chocolate covered cherries. I love James' writing, her insistence that the mystery genre can be literary and still adhere to ...
The Black Tower (2001)
I can't recall whether it was The Black Tower or a different book by P.D.James which was recommended to me among a sea of other "crime" books that should absolutely be read by anyone who likes the genre.Perhaps it was a different book. I hope it was a different book. It's more than possible I was...
Cover Her Face (2001)
PD James, Baronesa de Holland Park, es uno de los grandes nombres vivientes de la novela detectivesca junto con Ruth Rendell, Baronesa de Babergh. Con una multifacética carrera que incluyó participaciones en el ministerio del interior británico y en la mesa directiva de la BBC, James encarna a la...
A Taste for Death (2005)
A just-retired, blue-blooded government minister and a tramp have their throats cut in a church in James's well plotted, nicely paced mystery. I'm a big fan of James, and of her lovely Dalgliesh in particular. She allows Dalgliesh and his subordinate, Constable Kate Miskin, to be thoughtful, we...
A Mind to Murder (2001)
A Mind to Murder was originally published in 1963. It is just old enough that it appears quaint and charming rather than out dated. This book takes place three years after Cover Her Face, the first book in the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series, and Dalgliesh is now a published poet. Through happy ...
Unnatural Causes (2002)
There is a scene about midway through this book that if you squint just enough you might convince yourself could have come right out of a Raymond Chandler novel. Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James' contribution to the ranks of famous literary sleuths, is in a seedy Soho nightclub interrog...
Original Sin (2005)
This is the ninth book in the Adam Dalgliesh detective series in which the Commander is called in to investigate a murder at a prestigious publishing house called Peverell Press. The publisher’s offices are housed in an ornate Venetian Palace on the Thames called Innocent House, a building with a...
The Private Patient (2008)
I read this book because the author has just died (RIP), but it is not her first book that I read, but it could be the last because her endless descriptions of landscapes, characters and afternoon tea, tired me, even if the plots are well built. Maybe I should be English to appreciate fully her l...