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Richard Derrington and Deborah McAndrew star in this gripping BBC Radio 4 Full Cast dramatization of the award-winning Inspector Dalgliesh mystery, ''A Taste for Death,'' P. D. James' enduringly popular mystery. When two men are discovered with their throats cut in the vestry of St. Matthew's Church, the police are faced with an intriguing challenge, for one of the victims was ex-government minister Sir Paul Berowne, the other Harry Mack, a local tramp and alcoholic. For Commander Adam Dalgliesh, now heading a Scotland Yard unit set up to investigate politically sensitive crimes, the case is particularly affecting - he had known Berowne, and the minister had asked for his help regarding an anonymous letter shortly before his resignation. Could the letter, implicating Berowne in the deaths of two women, be linked to the bodies in the vestry? How are Berowne's wife and family involved - and what is the relationship between Berowne and the tramp? Aided by Inspector Kate Miskin and Chief Inspector John Massingham, Dalgliesh must answer these questions to uncover the truth .



About the Author

P. D. James

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.



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