About this item
Adam Dalgliesh takes on a baffling murder in the rarefied world of London book publishing in this masterful mystery. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of seemingly impenetrable complexity. A murder has taken place in the offices of the venerable Peverell Press. The victim is Gerard Etienne, the brilliant but ruthless new managing director, who had vowed to restore the firm's fortunes. Etienne was clearly a man with enemies-a discarded mistress, a rejected and humiliated author, and rebellious colleagues, one of whom apparently killed herself a short time earlier. Yet Etienne's death, which occurred under bizarre circumstances, is for Dalgliesh only the beginning of the mystery, as he desperately pursues the search for a killer prepared to strike and strike again.
About the Author
P. D. James, byname of Phyllis Dorothy James White, Baroness James of Holland Park, (born August 3, 1920, Oxford, Oxfordshire, England - died November 27, 2014, Oxford) , British mystery novelist best known for her fictional detective Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. The daughter of a middle-grade civil servant, James grew up in the university town of Cambridge. Her formal education, however, ended at age 16 because of lack of funds, and she was thereafter self-educated. In 1941 she married Ernest C.B. White, a medical student and future physician, who returned home from wartime service mentally deranged and spent much of the rest of his life in psychiatric hospitals. To support her family (which included two children) , she took work in hospital administration and, after her husband's death in 1964, became a civil servant in the criminal section of the Department of Home Affairs. Her first mystery novel, Cover Her Face (1962) , introduced Dalgliesh and was followed by six more mysteries before she retired from government service in 1979 to devote full time to writing. Dalgliesh, James's master detective who rises from chief inspector in the first novel to chief superintendent and then to commander, is a serious, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. The novels in which he appears are peopled by fully rounded characters, who are civilized, genteel, and motivated. The public resonance created by James's singular characterization and deployment of classic mystery devices led to most of the novels featuring Dalgliesh being filmed for television. James, who earned the sobriquet "Queen of Crime," penned 14 Dalgliesh novels, with the last, The Private Patient, appearing in 2008. James also wrote An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972) and The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982) , which centre on Cordelia Gray, a young private detective. The first of these novels was the basis for both a television movie and a short-lived series. James expanded beyond the mystery genre in The Children of Men (1992; film 2006) , which explores a dystopian world in which the human race has become infertile. Her final work, Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) - a sequel to Pride and Prejudice (1813) - amplifies the class and relationship tensions between Jane Austen's characters by situating them in the midst of a murder investigation. James's nonfiction works include The Maul and the Pear Tree (1971) , a telling of the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 written with historian T.A. Critchley, and the insightful Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) . Her memoir, Time to Be in Earnest, was published in 2000. She was made OBE in 1983 and was named a life peer in 1991.
