(notes while reading:) One of the reasons P.D. James is so great is utterly simple. She writes a murder mystery like it's a novel. This sounds facile, but it's unusual, often a hallmark of greatness like James's or Josephine Tey's. In this book, for example, the discovery of the body is written, not in order to give us all the details, clues and red herrings, of the body's condition, but as a truly traumatic event in the life of an established character, a rather sheltered young woman. This is what people mean when they tell you not to write to a formula. If you consider your story as a story, not as its genre, you transcend all the assembly-line books in the world.

Review: 3.5 stars
Ah, P.D. You are too good; it makes me raise my standards. This was just an okay Dalgliesh novel, which means I was never too scared on behalf of a character to stop listening, never caught myself musing on how totally awesome Dalgliesh is and missing parts of the story, et cetera. I was merely entertained and engaged the whole time. I enjoyed the wrinkles added to the plot by the fact that the murder happened at a forensic lab and most of the suspects were forensic scientists; but P.D. James has such a history of grabbing my heart as well as my brain with her mysteries that I am marking this one down for only getting the grey cells.

It took almost a third of the book to get to the murder. We had to meet all of the people who worked at this lab before one of the more unpleasant specialists, Lorrimer, was killed as he worked late one night. Dagliesh is called out (he arrives in a chopper). No one is sure how the murderer got away because the lab was locked up tight but then thought he went out the washroom window. Was it the lab head, his cousin for the inheritance, the abused lab assistant, or his wife? Those are cleared fairly early on. Second murder is frail writer who lives with Lorrimer's cousin. Turns out Stella (or Star) was also Lorrimer's ex-wife. Reason why Lorrimer wrote cousin out of the will was that he didn't want ex-wife to benefit in any way.

Star was trying to get loan from murderer so she and Angela could keep their house. Kerrison was having an affair with Domenica (Lorrimer's love) and Lorrimer threatened to write to Kerrison's wife while the two were in the middle of a custody battle for Nell and William. Dagliesh gets to the truth.

Too confusing because of too many characters in this murder story. All suspects are also policemen or forensic experts (murder in a forensic laboratory, they can't help it) witch makes it almost necessary to take notes whilst reading. I must admit I did read till the end because it was still intriguing.

I've read and enjoyed previous books in the Adam Dalgliesh series, but this one was very slow and hard to read for me. The beginning wasn't bad, although it took way too much to get to the murder, and even then the investigation wasn't all that exciting. The characters weren't interesting and even the solution was meh for me.
I don't remember having this problem with the previous books I've read, so I don't know if my tastes have changed or this is a weak book in the series... I will try others and see how I feel.

Very enjoyable read, but very focused on the mystery. Dalgliesh is a tough protagonist to enjoy sometimes, but his personal life (such as it is) comes through a little more here. James is playing the long game with this character, there's an assumption that we have plenty of time to get to know him (and six books in, she's not wrong) The suspects are interesting and the motives many. On a technical level, the story is very well-designed.

My trouble was getting invested in the story: The victim is a terrible person. This is a difficulty in a story like this, as I for one was left with the feeling that all the supporting characters were better off with him dead and I didn't really want Dalgliesh to find the killer. There's a dodge near the end to change that, something to turn us against the killer, but I can't say I was all that satisfied. More sad than anything, because the characters I liked didn't really wind up any better at the end, but that does fit the theme of murder-as-disruption all through the book. The characters start off miserable (as befits the dour nature of the setting), and many of them end up worse.

One of the things I find interesting is her use of POV shifts -- the narrative routinely jumps heads, but in a way that's not especially jarring. One of the big upsides to this is that it saves on many of the traditional wrap-up conversations between detective and assistant. In this case, that's helpful as Dalgliesh and his assistant aren't really that different from each other: conversations between them tend to be based more on age or special knowledge than any real personality or opinion difference.

By and large, if you like James's other books, I think you'll like this one. There's no gimmicks, just solid detective work in a difficult puzzle with plenty of twists and turns. If you read mysteries for the mystery per se and don't care about making friends with the investigator, I think you'll enjoy it. If you read them for zany cat detectives, skip this one.

Another multi-layered mystery, with a large cast of characters who are either suspects or related to a suspect. I enjoyed this one a bit more than the previous ones, couldn't quite solve it myself. I really like the way P.D. James writes more than I like Inspector Adam Dalgliesh, a very low key detective.

For a while I've been fed up with P.D. James's highly misanthropic stories, full of repulsive character and not much else. This one was a welcome change, toning down the more reprehensible elements and in their place providing an actual plot and crime riddle to be solved. With a small circle of suspects and a long start-to-corpse it might be one of the more Christie-like goods in her career which is always a win for me. I'm surprised how much I enjoyed it and I might actually give the author a second chance.

What fun it is to read a P.D. James mystery. Serious, brooding, artful, poetic - all of these adjectives describe Inspector Dalgliesh very well, but also the tone of P.D. James' mysteries in general. The puzzles are always good too, and this one is no exception.

This is my fifth P.D. James book--I keep looking for a good mystery writer, and she has a reputation. I am sorry to say that this is the end of the line, though. I seem to have started with the worst possible book--that Pride and Prejudice thing--which I stopped reading in utter horror around page 20. I am a Jane Austen fan, and I have my pride. Then I tried the two Cordelia Gray books, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath The Skin. Well, those two had a somewhat feeble female lead, weakened so much in the second book that we meet her at the peak of her career as a specialist in finding stray cats. And then she falls even further when she is put in the employ of a rich tycoon living on a small private island in a theatrical setting. That was a lot of layers of implausibility right there. The Lighthouse was my first Dalgliesh mystery, and I was dismayed to see that this novel was also set on a private island. Dangerous, murderous places, these private islands.

What I have discovered in reading James's novels is that she has a good literary style, which I enjoy, but her writing is poorly organized--undisciplined, one could say. The first tenth or more of every book is basically pointless. You could skip it and not miss anything important about the characters or anything else later in the book. This is true for Death of an Expert Witness, as well--if you start reading it and are wondering when all of this will become important, well, it won't. Her books are like that tedious style of joke where there is a long, boring build-up to a sometimes good punchline. Here, the buildup is almost completely unrelated to the actual case that the rest of the book is about. By now, I am fairly certain that this is the author's trademark--at the beginning of the first Cordelia Gray novel, a body is found after an apparent suicide, and ... absolutely nothing comes of that. It's actually a suicide, whose only plot point is to put Gray into the investigatorial position that is vacated by the dead body.

The setting of this novel is the fens--that part of Eastern England that resembles the Netherlands. I actually quite enjoyed the setting; Domenica Scholfield's house was vividly portrayed and I kind of wanted to move in. Indeed, James has a talent for describing people. Angela Foley is a picture in my mind, as are the two children of one of the two dozen suspects and their Dickensian babysitter Ms. Willard.

I would say that if there is a good reason to give her writing a chance, it is for the closely observed portraits of the gargoyles that populate her world. Her world is not a happy place, and there are very few likable characters, but they are all quite vividly drawn. She obviously disliked people but was interested in them. By "people", though, I think I have to mean "women", because her male characters are usually little more than ciphers. The women are arrogant, secretive, worried about pleasing others, insecure, knitting ominously, embedded in a stifling room smelling of sherry and loneliness, coldly manipulating their many lovers, neurotic--and every negative female archetype is to be found somewhere in her novels. The men are generally kind of samey. It's a pity that she chose the fundamentally uninteresting Dalgliesh character as her hero instead of creating a strong female lead, but I think she doesn't like people enough to have a character one might actually care about.

Open letter to P.D. James:

You are smart.

Stop trying to prove it.

THX!

Also:

I really feel like there's a good mystery somewhere in that brain of hers. Reading this book was peeling back layers of mediocre material to arrive at something good; ultimately, the central crimes were interesting. But she diluted the effect with too many obvious red herrings, too many equally potent motives, too many unnecessary details and, perhaps most importantly, not enough trust in the reader (for example, when the truth comes out, it's not necessary for the killer's confession to allude specifically to every shred of evidence uncovered in chapter 2). The effect is a strong impression of contrivance.

Also:

It's like she's overthinking it. Can I make it easier?

DO!:

- Give Adam Dalgliesh an interesting flaw and, for mercy's sake, take away the poetry-writing habit.
- Move the discovery of the first body up earlier than page 170, OR, make the first 170 pages interesting.
- Make the officers intelligent detectives, not detecting psychoanalysts.

DON'T!:

- Write a chapter from the point of view of every single character.
- Describe the motive of every character save one. GEE WHO IS THE KILLER.
- Make your star detective a poet. Sorry to be repetitive, but I really can't stress this enough.

This is the sixth Adam Dalgliesh mystery, originally published in 1977. I have been enjoying reading this series and enjoyed this novel very much.

Like many of P.D. James books, this is set in a closed community, with a good cast of suspects and motives. This book is set within Hoggat's Laboratory, in the Fenland of East Anglia. The victim is the disliked, bullying, Dr Edwin Lorrimor. Although Lorrimor is not a likeable man, as the novel continues, you do begin to feel some sympathy for him - not just for being murdered, obviously, but for his behaviour beforehand.

P.D. James was a writer who liked character above anything else and I feel much the same way. I do, sometimes, enjoy a fast-paced thriller, but really, my heart is in the slow unravelling of motive and the discovery of clues. Dalgliesh is not a showy detective, but he is sensitive, thoughtful and calm. I look forward to reading on in this series and finally reading it to the end.

It was a pleasant diversion. I watch more mysteries than I read because when I read I want to learn. Albeit you can always learn something from a British writers vocabulary and P.D. James was no exception. An enjoyable book.