P. James - The Black Tower

P. D. JAMES IS the greatest living mystery writer (People)

Just recovered from a grave illness, Commander Adam Dalgliesh receives a call for advice from the elderly chaplain at Toynton Grange, an isolated nursing home on the coast of England. But by the time Dalgliesh arrives, it is only to discover that his friend Father Baddeley has mysteriously died, as has one of the patients.

When the bodies begin to pile up, Dalgliesh once again finds his own life at risk as he determines to get to the truth behind his friends death and unmask the terrible evil at the heart of Toynton Grange.

The ability to haunt has earned P. D. James the title queen of crime. Long may she reign.

CHICAGO SUN-TIMES

Any ranking of todays best crime writers would surely put Britains P. D. James at or near the top.

THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE

P. D. JAMES is the author of twenty books, most of which have been filmed for television. Before her retirement in 1979, she served in the forensics and criminal justice departments of Great Britains Home Office, and she has been a magistrate and a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honors, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. In 2000, she celebrated her eightieth birthday and published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest.

A masterpiece.

Intriguing, suspenseful, full of strange twists youll love this one!

In the heroic tradition of Agatha Christie.

Mystery writers often deploy stereotypes in similar waysbut not P. D. James. She gives her people fully rounded life, never sacrificing character to plot, and makes deft fun of conversation.

Ms. James is simply a wonderful writer.

If were lucky, there will always be an England and there will always be a P. D. James.

One reads a P. D. James novel in something like the spirit that one reads a novel by Zola, Balzac, Thackeray, or Dickens.

James delivers the pace and tensions of a mystery yarn better than any other living writer.

P. D. James writes the most lethal, erudite, people-complex novels of murder and detection since Michael Innes first began and Dorothy Sayers left us.

The best practitioner of the mystery novel writing today.

The Private Patient

The Lighthouse

The Murder Room

Death in Holy Orders

Time to Be in Earnest: A Fragment of Autobiography

A Certain Justice

Original Sin

The Children of Men

Devices and Desires

A Taste for Death

The Skull Beneath the Skin

Innocent Blood

Death of an Expert Witness

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

The Maul and the Pear Tree:

The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (with T. A. Critchley)

Shroud for a Nightingale

Unnatural Causes

Cover Her Face

A Mind to Murder

Note:

Lovers of Dorset will, I hope, forgive me for the liberties I have taken with the topography of their beautiful county and in particular for my temerity in erecting my twin follies of Toynton Grange and the black tower on the Purbeck coast. They will learn with relief that, although the scenery is borrowed, the characters are completely my own and bear no resemblance to any person living or dead.

IT WAS TO BE the consultant physicians last visit and Dalgliesh suspected that neither of them regretted it, arrogance and patronage on one side and weakness, gratitude and dependence on the other being no foundation for a satisfactory adult relationship however transitory. He came into Dalglieshs small hospital room preceded by Sister, attended by his acolytes, already dressed for the fashionable wedding which he was to grace as a guest later that morning. He could have been the bridegroom except that he sported a red rose instead of the customary carnation. Both he and the flower looked as if they had been brought and burnished to a peak of artificial perfection, gift wrapped in invisible foil, and immune to the chance winds, frosts and ungentle fingers which could mar more vulnerable perfections. As a final touch, he and the flower had both been lightly sprayed with an expensive scent, presumably an aftershave lotion. Dalgliesh could detect it above the hospital smell of cabbage and ether to which his nose had become so inured during the past weeks that it now hardly registered on the senses. The attendant medical students grouped themselves round the bed. With their long hair and short white coats they looked like a gaggle of slightly disreputable bridesmaids.

Dalgliesh was stripped by Sisters skilled impersonal hands for yet another examination. The stethoscope moved, a cold disc, over his chest and back. This last examination was a formality but the physician was, as always, thorough; nothing he did was perfunctory. If, on this occasion, his original diagnosis had been wrong his self-esteem was too secure for him to feel the need for more than a token excuse. He straightened up and said:

Weve had the most recent path. report and I think we can be certain now that weve got it right. The cytology was always obscure, of course, and the diagnosis was complicated by the pneumonia. But it isnt acute leukaemia, it isnt any type of leukaemia. What youre recovering fromhappilyis an atypical mononucleosis. I congratulate you, Commander. You had us worried.

I had you interested; you had me worried. When can I leave here?

The great man laughed and smiled at his retinue, inviting them to share his indulgence at yet one more example of the ingratitude of convalescence. Dalgliesh said quickly:

I expect youll be wanting the bed.

We always want more beds than we can get. But theres no great hurry. Youve a long way to go yet. Still, well see. Well see.

When they had left him he lay flat on his back and let his eyes range round the two cubic feet of anaesthetized space, as if seeing the room for the first time. The wash basin with its elbow-operated taps; the neat functional bedside table with its covered water jug; the two vinyl-covered visitors chairs; the earphones curled above his head; the window curtains with their inoffensive flowered pattern, the lowest denominator of taste. They were the last objects he had expected to see in life. It had seemed a meagre, impersonal place in which to die. Like a hotel room, it was designed for transients. Whether its occupants left on their own feet or sheeted on a mortuary trolley, they left nothing behind them, not even the memory of their fear, suffering and hope.

The sentence of death had been communicated, as he suspected such sentences usually were, by grave looks, a certain false heartiness, whispered consultations, a superfluity of clinical tests, and, until he had insisted, a reluctance to pronounce a diagnosis or prognosis. The sentence of life, pronounced with less sophistry when the worst days of his illness were over, had certainly produced the greater outrage. It was, he had thought, uncommonly inconsiderate if not negligent of his doctors to reconcile him so thoroughly to death and then change their minds. It was embarrassing now to recall with what little regret he had let slip his pleasures and preoccupations, the imminence of loss revealing them for what they were, at best only a solace, at worst a trivial squandering of time and energy. Now he had to lay hold of them again and believe that they were important, at least to himself. He doubted whether he would ever again believe them important to other people. No doubt, with returning strength, all that would look after itself. The physical life would re-assert itself given time. He would reconcile himself to living since there was no alternative and, this perverse fit of resentment and accidie conveniently put down to weakness, would come to believe that he had had a lucky escape. His colleagues, relieved of embarrassment, would congratulate him. Now that death had replaced sex as the great unmentionable it had acquired its own pudency; to die when you had not yet become a nuisance and before your friends could reasonably raise the ritual chant of happy release was in the worst of taste.