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Summary
Summary
With all the qualities that P. D. James s readers have come to expect: a masterly psychological and emotional richness of characterization, a vivid evocation of place and a credible and exciting mystery.
When the notorious investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, books into Mr. Chandler-Powell s private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring, long-standing facial scar, she has every prospect of a successful operation by a distinguished surgeon, a week s peaceful convalescence in one of Dorset s most beautiful manor houses and the beginning of a new life. She will never leave Cheverell Manor alive. When Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate the murder and a second death occurs even more complicated problems than the question of innocence or guilt arise."
Author Notes
P. D. James, pseudonym of Phyllis Dorothy James White, was born on August 3, 1920 in Oxford, England. During World War II, she served as a Red Cross nurse. She worked in administration for 19 years with the National Health Service. After the death of her husband in 1964, she took a Civil Service examination and became an administrator in the forensic science and criminal law divisions of the Department of Home Affairs. She spent 30 years in British Civil Service. She became Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991.
Her first novel, Cover Her Face, was published in 1962. She wrote approximately 20 books during her lifetime including the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series, the Cordelia Gray Mystery series, and Death Comes to Pemberley. She became a full-time writer in 1979. Three titles in the Adam Dalgliesh Mystery series received the Silver Dagger award--Shroud for a Nightingale, The Black Tower, and A Taste for Death. In 2000, she published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest. Her dystopian novel, The Children of Men, was adapted into a movie in 2006. She received the Diamond Dagger award for lifetime achievement. She died on November 27, 2014 at the age of 94.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The latest (and perhaps final) mystery featuring Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police Service finds him preparing to confront crucial turning points in his life and career. Meanwhile, he must solve the murder of a ruthlessly inquisitive investigative journalist who was killed in a private Dorset clinic just hours after a pre-eminent plastic surgeon removed her disfiguring facial scar. Dalgliesh and his team unearth a plethora of motives (and an ugly secret or three) as they investigate the inhabitants of the secluded manor that houses the clinic. Rosalyn Landor's lovely, well-bred tones add warmth, color and precision to this fully rounded, compassionately told mystery. She gives every character his or her own voice, clearly delineating gender, age and social class. Her voice combines with James's text to lend sympathy to each character, regardless of what sins he or she may have committed. In every way, this is a perfect auditory experience. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 22). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
At 88, P. D. James has written her eighteenth novel, a feat in itself. Inevitably, there is plenty of summing up going on here, as Commander Adam Dalgleish approaches marriage and contemplates retirement from Scotland Yard. But before either of those life-changing events can take place, there is another case to solve, and Dalgleish's special investigating team, their murder bags packed, are on the road to a remote corner of Dorset, where a well-known investigative journalist has been killed following surgery at a private clinic. As usual, James places Dalgleish, Inspector Kate Miskin, and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith within an insular community and asks them to restore order to a tightly circumscribed world jarred by unnatural death. We follow the process of interviews with the staff at Cheverell Manor, a grand Tudor home converted to a clinic by a famous plastic surgeon, and we once again begin to formulate our list of suspects along with Dalgleish and the team. This time, though, James pays a bit less attention to the lives of the suspects and more to Dalgleish's inner turmoil (and, to some extent, that of Miskin and Benton-Smith). Longtime readers will be fine with this subtle switch in emphasis, as we sense the winding down of the landmark series and crave every possible insight into a character who has meant so much not only to his fans but also to the mystery genre itself. If this is the last Dalgleish novel, James has struck a fine valedictory note for her hero.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
The traditional comforts of the British country house mystery - puzzling plot, attractive setting, brainy detective, interesting characters - spill from P. D. James's latest novel, THE PRIVATE PATIENT (Knopf, $25.95), like harvest bounty from a cornucopia. The locale, which always sets the tone and determines the content of James's elegant storytelling, couldn't be more conducive for a quiet murder: Cheverell Manor, a Tudor pile in the Dorset countryside, for generations a blueblood family seat but now the private home and exclusive clinic of the renowned plastic surgeon, Dr. George Chandler-Powell. Inviting a mystery lover into this historic residence, with its timbered great hall and grand staircase leading to treasure-filled upper rooms, is like whispering "Once upon a time ..." to a child. Of course, inside Cheverell Manor, all is not as serene as the brows in the family portraits. The head nurse is unhappy with her role as the doctor's mistress. The housemaid is obsessed with the legend of a witch-burning at the Cheverell Stones, a prehistoric circle on the estate grounds. The surgical assistant is thinking of going to Africa to do good works, leaving his sister to fend off claims on their inheritance. And how happy can the estate manager be, numbly serving as caretaker of the home her father lost when Lloyd's of London crashed? Like the taciturn old gardener with the Dickensian moniker of Mogworthy ("a mine of information" for anyone who can induce him to talk), these are the kind of stock characters we're comfortable with in a classic whodunit. But with James in charge, they expand their functional roles to become complex individuals with troubled psychological histories. Even Rhoda Gradwyn, the patient who arrives at the clinic so she can be offered up to the plot as a murder victim, turns out to be a person of parts. As "one of the worst kind" of investigative journalists, Rhoda could pose a threat to someone in this secretive household. But James shows her primarily as a vulnerable patient, finally able to get rid of a disfiguring facial scar, borne in angry defiance for 34 years, because "I no longer have need of it." It takes a detective of deep intelligence and sensitivity to deal with the high-strung residents of Cheverell Manor, and for this, Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh is your man. Once he and his team settle in, people start cracking and the secrets come tumbling out. And if the resolution feels a bit rushed, chalk it up to the fact that Dalgliesh has to get a move on if he expects to make that long-awaited wedding day with his beloved Emma. Lucky for us, all the Swedish cops in THE INNER CIRCLE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $25.95) slept through their history classes on the Nordic gods. Difficult as that is to believe, it allows Mari Jungstedt to deliver stern minilectures about these ancient deities, whose followers left evidence of their culture buried all over the island of Gotland, where this mystery is set. Since more than 700 silver hoards from the Viking Age have already been unearthed, it's common to find human skeletons on archaeological digs like the one near Frojel Church. But it's not so common to find decapitated horses and ritualistically murdered archaeology students. Jungstedt writes briskly (in an efficient translation by Tiina Nunnally) about the growing frustration of Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas as he tries to make sense of these senseless acts. While she handles the gory details of the case with real verve and humanizes some of the emotionally chilly characters, Jungstedt's true passion seems to be Gotland itself. From the quaint medieval town of Visby to the wilderness promontory of Vivesholm, its landscape inspires a devotion the old gods would envy. For anyone who once held a career in government service and now feels the urge to unburden, anonymity is the way to go. James Church, the name taken by "a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia," created the cunning Inspector O to convey the surreal conditions of modern-day life in North Korea. Set earlier than the previous books in Church's headspinning series of thrillers, BAMBOO AND BLOOD (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) takes place in the frigid winter of 1997, when people were dying of cold and famine. During this "winter of endless sorrow," O is assigned to guard a mysterious foreigner who is allowed to wander into remote territory, setting off deep speculation about the government's ulterior motives. Of this dangerous propensity for convoluted thought, the inspector says, "Many animals hibernate in winter; I drift into philosophy." Elizabeth Ironside, the nom de plume chosen by the wife of a former British ambassador to the United States, secretly wrote a number of novels during her years of foreign travel as a diplomat's Spouse. A GOOD DEATH (Felony & Mayhem, paper, $14.95), which is set in the French countryside after the collapse of the Vichy government, gives short shrift to all those romantic legends about the French Resistance. In the haunted eyes of Theo de Cazalle, an aide to General de Gaulle, foreign troops were not the only ones who destroyed his country. Upon returning to his rural estate, he hears terrible stories connecting his wife with the dead German found on his front lawn, and sees for himself the vindictive acts committed by local factions of the Maquis. "Village war is not less significant than world war," he comes to realize over the course of this bleak and beautiful novel. "Village war is world war." P.D. James's latest novel is filled with the traditional comforts of the British country house mystery.
Library Journal Review
If there's murder in a nursing home, call in Adam Dalgliesh. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.