I’ve been reading / listening the Dalgleish stories in order, with one or two exceptions, and am enjoy8ng seeing the gradual exposing of character, temperament, back stories of Dalgleish, Massingham and Miskin.

A Taste for Death is the 7th in the canon and while faith and Anglicanism is occasionally mentioned 8n the previous books, here it takes centre stage with the main victim being dispatched in a high Anglican Church where he has, we learn experienced some sort of religious or quasi-religious experience.... whether or not that experience is relevant to the investigation becomes part of the conundrum Dalgleish and co have to wrestle with, As the victim is also, or was until very recently an MP, politics and faith, or the lack of it, are skill fully woven into the fabric of the story.

James richly deserved the golden dagger award she received for this novel, finely crafted as it is and richly layered with shades of human frailty and need.

(4.5) The writing in the beginning of this book stopped it from being a 5 for me. It was very atmospheric, as James' books are, but the character development didn't grab me until the second half of the book, and the unveiling of the characters is what makes me love this series. The murdered man was politician from an very upper class, titled family is found with his throat slit, in a not upper class church. The victim appears to have been an honorable and likable, one Dagliesh knew and can relate too. I learned more about Kate, who so far is my favorite Dagliesh subordinate.The description of the attire of women in this book, as in all the Dagliesh series, surprises me - I was an adult in the 80s, and I wasn't walking around in wool skirts and silk shirts! Perhaps that can be chalked up to the difference between a Florida girl and the British upper class. But, by the end of the book, I was engrossed in the characters, odd clothes or not, and I found the final pages to be both heartwarming and heartbreaking.

P.D. James is considered as a worthy successor to Agatha Christie and is widely regarded as one of the most celebrated crime novelists of our generation. But, in spite of all that I have never enjoyed reading her books. I mostly found them boring and bland.

Now, the book. The edition I was reading was a TV tie-up, with faces of two actors who played character parts in the dramatization of the novel and it was 552 pages long.

Paul Berowne who is an MP and a former cabinet minister is found dead in a church, with his throat slit with his own razor, along with fellow victim, Harry Mack, a homeless tramp. This incident brings Commander Adam Dalgleish, poet and detective into the scenario to find out who was responsible for the dirty deed. He, with his team sets about his task and in the process involves Berowne’s mother, his wife and her lover, daughter, his mistress and others. The plot and the motive was very simple. It all came down to money and jealousy. So, my problem with this book was that 552 pages were too much for this book. According to me the whole matter could and should have been condensed to a maximum of 350 pages.

I like my mystery novels with a liberal dose of clues and twists. I do like the psychological part, but an abundance of it turns the whole novel boring. In this case, there was serious lack of clues and twists, with an abundance of psychology. Every character was thinking, even the police was thinking, and amidst all these thought process, I could hardly find any useful bit related to the murder or the investigation. And there were conversations, long long boring conversations. The whole thing seemed that everyone was chatting, instead of providing clues or pointing out suspects they were all busy chatting!!!

The ending when it came, almost seemed a blessing!!! Literally it dropped out of the sky. All those pages, full of room descriptions and insightful chats and detailed characterisations etc etc were just there to fill up the pages. I felt cheated. 552 pages and I get this???? And, there was my nemesis to deal with, super long paragraphs!!!!

Hadn't read PD James in a while. Slightly disappointed with this book which I found overlong and a little slow. It was however beautifully written.

P.D. James at her best--wonderful plot, psychologically astute conflicts, quickly drawn but nevertheless well-developed relationships, and interesting personal quandaries for the detectives. This novel introduced the character Detective Inspector Kate Miskin, a woman who is succeeding in a man's world, with all the difficulties and rewards that entails. On my second (possibly third) reading, this crime novel still stands up.

An elderly woman and a ten-year-old waif discover two bodies in a chapel – a baronet and a tramp. Adam Dalgliesh, briefly acquainted with Sir Paul Berowne, is investigating together with Massingham and his new assistant Inspector Kate Miskin. Suicide/murder or double homicide?? At almost 500 pages it makes for tedious reading. However, the book ends on an intriguingly philosophical note. When Miss Wharton, the elderly woman character, goes back to the church where the murder occurred and ponders her beliefs (or lack thereof). “Then she remembered what Father Collins had once said in a sermon when she first came to St. Matthew’s: “If you find that you no longer believe, act as if you still do. If you feel that you can’t pray, go on saying the words.” She knelt down on the hard floor, supporting herself with her hands grasping the iron grille, and said the words with which she always began her private prayers: “Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof, but speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.’’(page 497).

The year of P.D. James rolls on.

As usual this is a well written mystery that grips you to the end. And of course seeing the teleplay years ago, it played through my head as I was reading the story.

There is one line from the book that did stick with me though about a woman’s feeling towards a man. I won’t spoil the story by noting it down.

I hope Number 8# in this series is just as good.

One of the better ones. I enjoyed the character development of Kate. This book delves more into life and people and their choices as much as the murder. The descriptions can be a bit overdone and I find myself skimming.

A just-retired, blue-blooded government minister and a tramp have their throats cut in a church in James's well plotted, nicely paced mystery. I'm a big fan of James, and of her lovely Dalgliesh in particular. She allows Dalgliesh and his subordinate, Constable Kate Miskin, to be thoughtful, well-rounded characters, deserving of our admiration. Nearly everyone else in the book (along with nearly everyone else in every P.D. James book) comes in for very harsh treatment. James is a deeply misanthropic writer. (I'm not a fan of the misanthropy.) The upper classes are chilly and condescending; the lower classes, especially the women, are sour, or bitter, or have given up on happiness. The proles, and the elderly, are always cruelly sketched:

She was, he guessed, in her late thirties, and was uncompromisingly plain in a way it struck him few women nowadays were. A small sharp nose was imbedded between pudgy cheeks on which the threads of broken veins were emphasized rather than disguised by a thin crust of make-up. She had a primly censorious mouth above a slightly receding chin already showing the first slackness of a dewlap. Her hair, which looked as if it had been inexpertly permed, was pulled back at the sides but frizzed over the high forehead rather in the poodle-like fashion of an Edwardian. (Evelyn Matlock, p. 93)

Her skin was cleft with deep lines running from the jaw to the high jutting cheekbones. It was as if two palms had been placed against the frail skin and forced it upwards, so that he saw with a shock of premonitory recognition the shine of the skull beneath the skin. The scrolls of the ears flat against the sides of the skull were so large that they looked like abnormal excrescences. (Ursula Berowne, p. 96)

The flesh seemed to have slipped from the bones so that the beaked nose cleft the skin sharp as a knife edge while the jowls hung in slack, mottled pouches like the flesh of a plucked fowl. The flaming Massingham hair was bleached and faded now to the colour and texture of straw. He thought: He looks as archaic as a Rowlandson drawing. Old age makes caricatures of us all. No wonder we dread it. (Lord Dungannon, p. 168)

A mouth is never merely a mouth, but "a moist focus of emotion." A character she doesn't like just can't win. "His tone was almost studiously polite, but neither sardonic nor provocatively obsequious." Really? You're going to hold that against him?

In the weirdest, most misogynistic category, this would probably be the winner: She had the drained look which Sarah had seen on the face of a friend who had recently given birth, bright-eyed, but bloated and somehow diminished, as if virtue had gone out of her. (Evelyn Matlock, p. 393)

The poor grandmother!

Comme un très looooooong épisode d'Arabesque... ^^

Like a great crime novel and family fiction all put together. This feels like a dramatic shift for James, and I am totally on board.