so good! It's fun to re-read them in order, each is better than the last.

I'm going to have a hard time reviewing this - mostly a hard time deciding how to rate it. This kindle edition is a smidgen over 600 pages. For 575 of them, I thought this is probably the best of the series, or at the very least a close second to A Taste for Death. And then I was outraged at those last 25 pages. I could put my reason behind spoiler tags but my thoughts are more involved than I think appropriate.

The beginning introduces us to a temp shorthand typist employed by Peverell Press. On young Mandy Price's first day she discovers the body of a woman employee who has committed suicide. A very few chapters later we are told there are three murders within the month that Mandy is employed. The firm is not a large one but there are still enough characters to keep track of. Just enough and certainly distinct enough, in my opinion, that there was never a chance of getting them confused.

It is pretty easy to turn the pages in this one. Mysteries are usually more about plot than characterization. What I have liked about this series so far is both the writing and the characterization. I like the characterizations of Dalgliesh and his team, and the supporting characters of the publishing company were also well drawn. In this, there was also a pretty good plot. I was convinced I knew who the perpetrator was, and once I knew that was wrong, I realized I probably should have been more discerning.

So. Here I am still unsure what to do about that ending. This was never going to be 5-stars, but I did think it was likely a strong 4-stars. I think it comes down to the fact that I liked it so well for nearly all of it, that I can bring myself to only say the ending weakened it mightily for me, but I cannot downgrade it to 3-stars.

Look, the mystery was fine, the conclusion was not. The idea with mysteries is that generally the solutions is within the sphere of the book. I don't want to read an entire novel and then have THAT end.
(It's been two months since I read this and I still feel like I was taken advantage of. Therefore the three stars.)

I picked up another PD James, assuming that Original Sin would offer further exposure to the sombre, richly scented world of British Anglo-Catholicism, apparent in such other Dalgleish mysteries as Death in Holy Orders and A Taste for Death. The nearest thing to religion turned out ot be a green velvet draft excluder and murder accoutrement, shaped like a serpent and named Hissing Sid. Instead we find ourselves in a world PD James certainly knew well: Innocent House, home of the venerable Peverell Press, a centuries-old publishing firm where typewriters still outnumbered computers (with floppy disks), copy-editing took place in-house, at the hands of stern adjudicators of style and structure, and was not farmed out to anonymous, free lancing correctors of typos from who knows where, the PR person had been on the job for years and did not change two or three times a year, at a time when Amazon was still a river (Jeff Bezos’ enterprise would start up the year Original Sin was published), and Goodreads?—well, nobody had heard of such a thing.
But Peverell Press is having enough trouble adapting to a changing publishing world of buyouts and conglomerates, and trying to cope with a brilliant, young CEO, Gerard Etienne, determined to close the Press, while proclaiming, “The business of publishing is to give people what they want. What’s wrong with cheap, romantic fiction if that’s what they happen to enjoy? Authors always take rejection badly. They equate it with infanticide.” As readers gasp in horror (at least some readers) and young Gerard announces his intention to sell the firm and sack various faithful old retainers, Frances Peverell exclaims, “This house is sold over my dead body—or yours!” (Words that at this juncture might come right out of cheap, romantic fiction—as PD surely knew.)
I kept wondering if the corners of PD’s mouth were twitching with quiet amusement as she wrote: it was certainly deadly enough, but, to my ear, less earnest than her usual. There was a self-conscious nod to “Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey and the few modern writers whom Joan considered fit to join those Golden Age practitioners in fictional murder”—who, of course, go unnamed (as do any writers of the male persuasion). Readers are also taken to lunch at a fusty, old true crime gentleman’s Cadaver Club, which “takes the view that, where murder is concerned, fiction cannot compete with real life”—it sounds like a more exclusive version of Goodread’s own “Obsessed with True Crime” group. We meet an appealing, smart, and observant temp typist named Mandy with a tendency to stumble over dead bodies—a proto-Abby Sciuto (Paulay Perrette) from NCIS. Good fun, and, to my ear, betraying a somewhat sparer style than James’s usual. Had she been reading Ruth Rendell (another possible addition to “the few modern writers”)?

I should have been able to give this book 5 stars, since it's set in a publishing house & that's my field. However, I can't. I did enjoy reading it--was up till 1:30 a.m. finishing it, in fact (mysteries are SO addictive!). But I found the story a bit muddled & the range of characters a little strange. The copy editor is the focus of one short chapter & is never mentioned before or after! (We do tend to be reclusive, but we're not peripheral.) The marketing folks, who are generally the most extroverted & visible employees of any publisher, were cameos as well. Meanwhile there's some James-formulaic balancing of characters: A young girl, new to the firm, who has a crucial role in discovering a couple of the bodies but not in the knotted relationships surrounding the murders. The triangle of investigators (Adam, Kate, & an ambitious younger man), with a bit of attention given to their personal lives early on but most of those threads left dangling.

The story at the root of the murderer's motivation (which I will not mention so as not to spoil) is quite fascinating. The setting on the Thames is given beautiful emphasis. So it is worth reading but not the best ever.

Murder at a publishing house. As usual, PD James builds up an interesting environment - but her murderers and endings leave a little to be desired.

Interesting because of setting of murder. Much too long: at 400+ pages. Everyone seemed to have motives except the villain where all tumbled out at once in final chapters.

Murder mystery set in a London publishing house. This is the 9th book in the Adam Dalgliesh series, but it was easy to forget that as it takes over 100 pages for a murder to occur and even longer for the great man to make his supercilious appearance. In fact, AD appears rarely throughout the story, as PD James regales us with the backstory of every suspect, victim, witness and police officer.

As this series progresses, the books get longer and more wordy, with lots of detailed description and analysis of each character’s thoughts. This does give the books a more literary atmosphere, which many readers may enjoy, but I prefer a more succinct style for the crime genre, where a few well chosen words show who we’re dealing with. Even with all this description, the characters are not always convincing, and I struggled to engage with them.

Furthermore, this book has a massively disappointing ending. There are loose ends unresolved, a threadbare rationale for the murderer’s sudden killing spree, plot twists that rely on a basic lack of professionalism by several police officers, and a ludicrous denouement. Underlying all this is a train of thought that verges on anti-Semitic in its execution, and a rushed examination of some very complex moral issues.

While I did enjoy parts of this book, overall it left me feeling cheated for all the time I’d put into it. If I weren’t reading this series for a group challenge, I’d probably stop here.

Oh dear, I'm beginning to think that I'm enjoying writing grumpy reviews of PDJ's 'middle period' books more than actually reading them! This one, like her Devices and Desires and A Taste for Death, is just so bloated: at 600 pages, probably about 350 of them could have been cut as they do nothing other than show off PDJ's unending and ponderous attention to the insignificant - even minor walk-on characters, their clothes and their environments along with their backstories are laid out before us even though they are utterly peripheral to the story at hand and can be dispensed with without affecting the plot in the slightest. This seems to be standard James practice but what is especially noticeable about this book is that 90% of what happens is a red herring! Was that supposed to be subverting the traditional whodunnit? I don't know, but in my book it's frustrating and silly.

My other major issue is that in this book PDJ seems to have discovered The Jew. Despite this having been published in 1994 and set in London, new addition to Dalgleish's team DI Daniel Aaron is portrayed like an exotic who PDJ has never spied before so that everything about him and his role in the book is inflected by his Jewishness: he's subjected to casual anti-Semitism, he has a 'Jewish Mother', his only non-work conversation he has with a colleague is all about how 'different' he is because he's Jewish and an atheist and he can't ask for time off to go to a Bar Mitzvah because it's not a recognised Christian occasion and should he go to the Bar Mitzvah anyway...

Even introducing Daniel for the first and only time in this book is linked to his Jewishness: after much faffing around with motives for everyone to kill publisher Gerard Etienne, turns out it all goes back to the Holocaust - and that Daniel is ready to aid and abet the (Jewish) triple murderer because he's taking revenge for his family being turned over to the Nazis. Whether intentionally or not, the characterisation of Daniel plays on the stereotype of the perpetual 'outsider' Jew who will abandon his role as a Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police and all that goes with that in order to align himself with a multiple murderer because of their shared Jewishness - it's a version of the 'Jewish conspiracy' theory and it left such a nasty taste in my mouth that an already 3-star book dropped another star just for this covert form of anti-Semitism. Needless to say, Daniel, it is implied, will be off the team at the end, presumably his career in the police destroyed. Which will please his Jewish Mother. That the Jewish murderer is also shown to be in error so that his killing can't even be justified in his own head and he has to commit suicide just adds to the generally offensive subtext.

As usual, PDJ writes with great solemnity: words like 'painstaking', 'protracted' and 'verbose' were made to describe her later books. Her continued authorial fawning over Dalgleish just amuses me now and the PDJ Bingo Card contains the usual: the instance of other characters discussing what a fine poet Dalgleish is (tick!); the instance where he walks into a room and identifies an elusive painting and its painter at a glance (tick!); the instance where a bar of classical music is heard and he pins it straightaway (tick!); the instance where he takes time out from the terrible moral burden of his job to explore the peaceful interior of an old church (double tick!).

PDJ draws on GA detective fiction but her abandonment of the deft writing, characterisation and fluid pace of the greats (Christie, Sayers, Tey, for me) is resulting, at this stage in her career, in huge slow-moving behemoths weighted down with laborious prose and plotting. Can she get back to the brisker pace of her earlier books? And tone down at least some of her ultra-conservative values? We'll see.

Such awesome mysteries with interesting characters. It's too bad Ms. James felt she needed to give too much background on secondary characters.

I seldom give five stars in a review but this one deserves it. Meticulously constructed, the mystery gradually unfolds to the final horror. As always James's descriptions are a large part of the plot. She has the art of painting multilayered word pictures. Held me gripped to the last page.

Having been brought up on a standard diet of Agatha Christie, I usually find all other crime novelists wanting as there is no "Aha!" at the end in most of them. The mystery may be well imagined and plotted, but Dame Agatha's trick of producing the rabbit out of the hat cannot be emulated by anyone else. That is why I was not a big fan of P. D. James initially.

Over the years, however, I have come to value the literary quality of her novels. While the others are content to write competent English and leave the characterisation to a few deft sketches, James takes enormous care over both. Her English is a joy to read, and her characters, down to the most insignificant of them, are meticulously sketched. And in this particular novel, the way she has described the Thames and the life along it is so evocative as to take one's breath away. This is one mystery I read slowly, savouring the language all the way.

Gerard Etienne, first among equals of the partners owning the Peverell Press is the murder victim - he's enough of a blackguard to qualify for the honour. (In fact, had this been a Christie novel, he wouldn't have gotten past page 20 alive.) Self-centered, ruthless and entirely lacking in any kind of sentiments, he has pissed off virtually everybody including the other partners, staff and clients. So it is no wonder that he winds up as a dead body in the small archives room, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning in a carefully contrived accident.

As Adam Dalgliesh and his able deputies, Kate Miskin and Daniel Aaron arrive on the scene, the plot thickens with red herrings, broken alibis, and more murders...

___

As mysteries go, this was a pretty decent one. The solution is entirely satisfying and believable, with a final twist which is impossible to see coming. I would say had I really racked my brains I could have solved it partway at least, but that does not take away from the cleverness of the plotting.

However, two things dragged down this mystery from 4 to 3 stars for me: (1) a superfluity of characters whose lives are described at length, but who do not contribute much to the story and (2) the anticlimax of the denouement (no, that's not a spoiler!). I believe the author should have kept it tighter and worked more on her climax.