It's taken me a good half of the series to really start to enjoy the Dalgliesh books, and this one was very good. So many red herrings and rabbit trails-I was stumped to figure out the culprit and even when it was revealed I was thinking it was actually going to turn out to be someone else! It will be interesting to see if love has found Dalgliesh after all.

Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard has been asked by Sir Alred Treeves to take a closer look into the suspicious death of his adopted son Ronald, who suffocated under the cliffs near St. Anselms by an avalanche of sand. Was it an accident, suicide, or murder? Dalgliesh, the son of a rector, has former ties to the school - as a young teen, he spent several happy summer holidays there among the priests and ordinands.

There is no shortage of possible suspects, or motives, for Ronald's death. But before Dalgliesh even arrives on the scene, another death occurs - a death everyone else considers natural and expected. Dalgliesh wonders otherwise. As the body count continues to rise, so too the means, motive and opportunity of almost the entire community of St. Anselms. Dalgliesh and his team steadily work to reveal the killer or killers before someone else falls victim. Long-time widower Dalgliesh is furthered hampered in the investigation by his unexpected feelings for a visiting guest lecturer, Emma Lavenham. Will the possibility of love turn out to be a blessing or curse for Dalgliesh?



Death in Holy Orders is another extremely entertaining whodunnit by P.D. James, and without a doubt my favorite (so far) of the three I've read (in backwards order). Very possibly, this has everything to do with the excellent TV adaptation starring Martin Shaw as Dalgliesh, Robert Hardy as Father Martin and Jesse Spencer as Raphael Arbuthnot. The movie stayed fundamentally true to the events from the book, but also added another layer of texture to the story and characters IMO.

The thing I liked most about the story was the backdrop; St. Anselms, the fictional elitist theological college on a remote Suffolk coast, which is known for turning out the best and brightest Anglican priests, but is now in danger of being decommissioned by the CoE powers that be (not to mention the very real threat of the college tumbling into the North Sea by an eroding cliffline). The solitude found in and around the setting, along with the contemplative (almost monastic) aspect of the story definitely appealed to my personal taste. The characters carried around their own brand of P.D. James' favorite pet vices; petty power struggles, greed, various sexual insecurities/proclivities, religious apathy and a pervading sense of depression.

Good, if predictable, fare. I'll have more, please.

In Death in Holy Orders, eleventh in the Adam Dalgliesh crime fiction series, his planned vacation is rerouted to a place he once stayed as a boy, a small religious college in an isolated coastal region, where a young ordinand’s death has been designated as an accident, but an anonymous letter to his father has since aroused suspicion - Dalgliesh arrives to find not one suspicious death at the college, but two, and these are followed by a brutal and very obvious murder.

I find P. D. James refreshing to read; her non-series characters (those who are not Dalgliesh, his colleagues, or connected to him personally) are incredibly well written, no matter how peripheral they may be. I’ve begun making a point of picking one up whenever a previous book disappoints me in terms of characterisation – to prove to myself that I’m not just being picky, that it’s possible to infuse any genre with individuals who are neither lazily portrayed, nor overplayed to compensate. There are other female crime writers who are just as strong in this area, but I’m on a P. D. James kick just now, because she also plots and instils atmosphere wonderfully, as well; in this book, the sadness and isolation were layered with beautiful subtlety. Death in Holy Orders seemed a little long-winded in places (there seemed to be more ‘middle’ to this book than was strictly necessary) but a very rewarding read.