3.5 stars. An interesting, overly long crime fiction novel where the motive for the crime is the most puzzling element of the murders. The novel is set in the book publishing world, in Innocent House, on the Thames in the East End of London. Commander Dalgleish investigates the death of Innocent House’s managing director, who was found half naked with a snake draught-excluder stuffed in his mouth.

This book was first published in 1994.

4.5 stars

"If you're going to play God Almighty, then you'd better make sure beforehand that you have His wisdom"

Slam. Ouch.

Having read 12 PD James mysteries thus far and being a self-professed huge fan of both her style and character studies, I think I just might have to put "Original Sin" right up there with my favourites.

Beyond being just a murder mystery, it also is a minute exploration of a biblical theme: Old Testament style justice and how dangerous it can be when  people who don't believe in God take revenge/justice into their own hands. And get it wrong, despite their best efforts, for the simple reason that they are human. The hubris of man thinking he's god-like.  

Some have criticised the novel - and indeed most of James' longer works -- as being unnecessarily bloated. I can't agree in this case. Yes, it IS long, but everything and every detail has its place in the overall picture. It all fits and (almost) all of it is needed to create the overall tapestry that allows the theme to come through.

That this theme comes out mostly in the last half of the novel is really the only reason I'm taking off half a star. It could have popped up earlier without spoiling things. And extra points for the snide commentary on authors who think they're geniuses when they are but mere mediocre talents with entitlement complexes. (Again, ouch!)

Still, as good as I think this one is. I wouldn't rec it to anybody who's never read PD James. This is more for those who know, and like, her style.

James writes this mystery, set at the fictional Peverell Press in London, with exceptional knowledge of the activity and dynamics of a publishing house. The celebration and critique of this world made the setting enjoyable for me. Along with some theological reflection on the title of the book and a twist on James' usual mystery formula, I found a lot to like in this book. My main critiques are that Dalgliesh wasn't in the book as much as he is in most volumes in the series and too much information was withheld until the end, meaning that the reader is really just along for the ride, rather than really unraveling the mystery.

It has been a while since I read a book by this author and I had forgotten how much I enjoy her style of writing. In one review I saw it described as "intelligent writing" and I think that describes it perfectly. She has a tendency to describe things in great detail,sometimes two or three pages of detail, but I find I can live with that. Adam Dalgleish is a favourite of mine but this book gave greater importance to his two offsiders, Daniel and Kate. I enjoyed the lovely descriptions of London and the river and also the setting in a publishing company. There were an awful lot of dead bodies and it eventually ended up reminiscent of an Agatha Christie. But there's nothing wrong with that! I raced through all 511 pages of it and plan to read another P.D. James very soon.

Here I will use P.D. James' own description of a writer character to describe how I felt about this book, "She wasn't consistent. Just when you thought: God, I can't go on with this boring drivel, she'd produce a really good passage and the book would suddenly come alive." Except all those passages were about minor characters that I didn't really need to know about.

There’s a time and a season for everything, to badly paraphrase the author of Ecclesiastes. This book had lain amidst the unread treasures and detritus on my books hard drive for 14-1/2 years. You really needn’t read the earlier books in the series to enjoy this, but it helps somewhat. For example, Kate Miskin from the previous book is back, and that’s a good thing. The ever-conceited Adam Dalgliesh, of course, is front and center. You get to meet new characters, too. Mandy Price, the hat-designing Yamaha-riding 18-year-old temp secretary is new and memorable.

There’s trouble at Peverell Press. A long-time editor presumably commits suicide as the book opens, and the company’s governing board is in a state of extreme dislike and disunity. On an October morning, they find the Managing Director, Gerard Etienne, dead with the office mascot, a stuffed snake, in his mouth. It’s clear someone murdered Etienne.

Dalgliesh and associates begin questioning even the suicide of a disgruntled employee. Mandy found the body of the suicide victim, and one night after work, when she returned to the office to retrieve something she forgot, she spotted a floater in the Thames. Mandy alerts some of the publishing house’s employees who live near the site, and they pull from the river the body of Esmé Carling, an aging author whose work Peverell Press had published for nearly 30 years. In one of his cost-cutting moves in preparation for selling the publishing house, Etienne cruelly and abruptly told Esmé her work had no value to the publishing house, and she should no longer submit future manuscripts.

Mandy Price with her eccentric way of dressing and her hard exterior when it comes to finding dead bodies in unnatural states captivated me so much that I feared for several pages that she would be among the dead. Before the book ends, someone murders Gerard Etienne’s sister, Claudia, and nearly takes the life of Frances Peverell, a direct descendant of the founder of the publishing house.

I used the commercial narration of this. I didn’t want to endure the fake British accent of the NLS-contracted narrator. If you must deal with British accents, you may as well find a bona fide Brit to narrate your book, and that’s what I did with the Penelope Dellaporta narration. She provided an excellent narration that in many ways electrified the book and gave me added reasons to press on with it.

The ending, which I’m not going to write about here, left me slightly disgruntled and disturbed. Don’t misunderstand; it was a master stroke of an ending, but I came away grousing just a bit.

A very literate, but ultimately disappointing read that telegraphed every development in the plot. Nothing comes as a surprise, yet this novel is loaded with loose ends and red herrings that are marked as such by the characters themselves. They just can't seem to get interested in what they themselves are doing. and while the true culprit is obvious from the get go the book steams along throwing out new distractions and violence on a clockwork basis. Needless POV characters whose backstory we are given in great detail. Central characters that are so lifeless that their eventual, inevitable, demise is empty of interest. All staged within an unlikely-to-the-point-of-absurd venue.
The book opens with concerns about a practical joker creating chaos in the fairyland setting of a publishing house lodged within a Venetian palace on the Thames embankment. Then the POV moves to follow a young iconoclastic lassie who arrives as a temp typist and follows her about. Then there is a death on the top floor in the archives. This takes up 1/3rd of the book, and none of it matters except as exposition. Then a couple of murders happen and the person behind it is obvious. Who has no family connections to the press, yet sits on the board? Who has a tragic backstory that doesn't seem to affect his actions? Who is the only person who works in the archives, spends endless days there? Whose recorder disappears? Who always brought an electric space heater to the archives, and so never used the gas? Who is old enough to have a personal grudge against the mysterious elder Etienne? At the point where Dalgliesh is driving away from his musings in the chapel and he is thinking to himself "That man has a secret", you have everything you need to know to identify the killer. Yet the novel lurches on for another handful of murders and attempts. Then in the closing, where Detective Aaron allows the killer to just walk away out of some grotesque mix of Jewish survivor's guilt and God's justice? That was just a clumsy attempt to hide that there was no detection going on in this detective novel. This has happened before in James' novels; she will write lovely and descriptive prose around the crimes, but not spend time developing an investigation into those crimes. This bothers me.

I continue to read PD James novels because they are finely written and interesting, but the quality can be very uneven. I even find it hard to accept Dalgliesh as a fully developed character. After reading several of the novels he still feels like a void. As a character he is a collection of sadnesses and aesthetic tastes, esoteric knowledge and poems. He is all depths and no shallows. Kate loves him, but god knows why.

I always find PD James' characters a little old fashioned, as though they had stepped straight out of the 1950s or even the 1930s, but this one looked promising, set as it was in a publishing business and based in an extraordinary house right on the Thames - Georgian elegance at the back and Venetian palazzo splendour at the front and inside. While I enjoyed the book and didn't guess whodunnit till right at the end, I couldn't really identify with any of the characters - except the River Thames itself, which was by far the most interesting. The weirdest thing is that when I got to the final scene, set in a particular historic place I know quite well, it suddenly seemed extraordinarily familiar and I realized that I had either read it before or heard it on the radio - yet I couldn't remember a thing about the rest of the book. I remain a devoted Ruth Rendell fan - we all have to choose a side!

Good story but soooo long because of excessive descriptions (such as what a customer looked like including clothes although the customer occupied one paragraph in the entire novel.

When you buy a crime thriller by P D James you know exactly what you're getting. It's like putting on a pair of comfortable slippers, familiar and restful! Original Sin is no exception. A very good story with well written characters, all well educated and quite posh!! Daniel Weyman provides an excellent narration with his measured tones and his BBC pronunciation. A good story that I enjoyed.

According to my buddy Ron, "Original Sin is the best novel containing a murder mystery between Brothers Karamazov and Infinite Jest." I so appreciate good hyperbole.

Anyone else with an opinion about whether it's okay to jump in at #9 of this series?

In this voluminous thriller i found the first many pages unattractive. Interest picked up only after Gerard's death. A lot is devoted to the characters' wear and even more to the architecture of the structures they inhabited. The old fashioned English and sentence structures may not attract those who read for the thrill of a detective novel; though I enjoyed it thoroughly.Though only one death turned out to be a genuine instance of suicide, the other four deaths were discovered to be cold-blooded murders.
The motif of the murders, at the end, raises the eternal issue of 'justice' vs 'revenge'.