More unmourned murderees... (Death in Holy Orders - P.D. James)

Member Name: pje

Product:	Death in Holy Orders - P.D. James
Date:	20/05/01 (157 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Murders for the reading pleasure of old ladies by an old lady.

Disadvantages: Unnecessary background frippery and no real surprises.

Another outing for Commander Adam Dalgleish in another typical P.D. James setting: St. Anselm's theological college - an isolated, cliff-side institution on the East Anglian coast.

St. Anselm's is destined for closure - the only question is whether the church will shut it down before the encroaching sea does.
But the wording of the will of its founder, and a valuable painting bequeathed by her as an altar piece for the college church, could make someone very rich. The question is, who?

A student is found dead, buried under a sand fall; his father - a wealthy businessman with connections, receives an anonymous note implying that it wasn't an accident, and asks Scotland Yard to investigate. Having stayed at St. Anselm's as a boy, Dalgleish takes it upon himself to look into the case.

The book begins with diary entries by Margaret Munroe,
the matron of St. Anselm's, in which she describes finding
the body, and then later realises that she has stumbled upon
a secret in the life of someone at the college - and of course,
she doesn't like to write it down before talking to the person concerned! This is, inevitably, the cue for her to be bumped off.

And she's not the only one...


The author's note made me laugh - she says that she "would
not wish to discourage candidates for the Anglican priesthood."
Well, quite... Don't worry kids, theological colleges aren't really hotbeds of intrigue and bloody murder (well, not often anyway!)

I also had to laugh when one character said: "I've a feeling
no one will be apologizing to the archdeacon in the morning."
In case that's too subtle a hint as to what's to come, part two
(or rather "book two") is entitled: Death of an Archdeacon.

Thankfully the book gathers pace here, after being bogged down
with little bits of biographical back
ground info pointlessly supplied for each minor character. For example, we're told that one character's father "married late and had lost his wife to breast cancer" and her sister Marianne was "killed by a drunken driver"
- as if that makes the character seem more real somehow.
Perhaps they are supposed to be red herrings, or like cornflour thrown in to thicken the plot. I don't think Agatha Christie would have bothered - she would have just got on with it, and played out the mystery in half the time.

If you're a fan of P.D.James/Adam Dalgleish you will want to read this (and probably already have) if not I would recommend that you wait for ITV to get round to filming it (or has Roy Marsden given up the role now?)

By the way, the murderer is g5rgiyt89h89g54roe8wofyó0'w4g0w
<slumps over the keyboard in a pool of blood>

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