This was the second book I'd read in the Adam Dalgleish series. I nearly finished reading it a few months ago and, admittedly, struggled through it so much that I started it all over again. This time, I got through it. However, I found that I kept losing track of all the characters and had to keep referring back in the book to find out how each was related to the other. The primary story involved the finding of two dead people in a church vestry by an older female parishioner and a young boy she had befriended. The deceased were recently-resigned British political figure and a street bum. Dalgleish and his sidekicks go on to investigate the complex scene to discover whether it was murder, suicide, and the many people who might have been involved. I wouldn't recommend this particular story to new readers of P.D. James. Save it for a time when you've gobbled up other stories of hers.

P.D. James handles her plot line well, she avoids explicit sexual detail and keeps profanity to a minimum. She also solves her mysteries with logical explanations, which I like. However, this book suffers from an overdose of trivia, which bogs down the story and occupies a large percent of its 480 pages. She describes buildings and the rooms within those buildings in minute detail that has no relevance to the plot. Every room receives an account of each piece of furniture, its style, placement in the room, and the material from which it is made. We get descriptions of the wallpaper, the bookcases (often floor to ceiling—a feature I’ve never seen outside of movies), the bookcase contents, the art hanging on the walls, and the view from the windows.

Her tendency to pile on the detail goes beyond buildings. The book begins with an elderly woman and a young boy walking together to a church. We are given every detail of the path, the plants that grow along the way, their actions, the way they met, their customary schedule, and a lengthy description of the church.

I find her characters difficult to relate to, though that got better in the last 20% of the book. James’s hero, Adam Dalgliesh, is melancholy and aloof, and extremely unrealistic. James doesn’t mention his ability to leap tall buildings with a single bound, but he can recognize the period, artist and name of all the paintings or art prints in those over-described rooms, he discusses architectural detail knowledgably using correct architectural vocabulary, and he understands medical terminology that would go over the head of most normal non-medical mortals. The detail that I found most absurd was when he walked into a room, and within seconds identified the music being played as Telemann’s Viola Concerto in G, conducted by Neville Marriner. Really? Who, other than viola players, even listens to viola concertos? I have a degree in music, and I checked on Amazon to make sure that there was such a thing. To remember the key a piece is written in is rare in non-musicians, to recognize any piece composed by Telemann is not common even among musicians, and to think that anyone could recognize a conductor without reading the recording’s jacket is beyond belief.

One of my favorite British police procedurals. James really knows how to create a world around her characters.