Two bodies are found in the vestry of a London church, their throats cut. One is a tramp who had regularly used church premises as a doss-house. The other is a prominent Tory MP, Sir Paul Berowne. As P.D. James's sensitive and intelligent detective, the poet and policeman Adam Dalgliesh, investigates the mystery of what led two such different men to be united in death, he is drawn further and further into the tangled lives of Berowne's family and friends. Beneath a veneer of gentility and old-world politesse, the Berownes and theirassociates have plenty to hide and it becomes Dalgliesh's job to bring secrets to light and to decide which, if any, are relevant to his enquiries.

In many ways, the novels of P.D. James are throwbacks to the Golden Age of classic English crime fiction. They take place in settings where Dorothy L. Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey would not have been out of place. In Death in Holy Orders, Dalgliesh visits St Anselm's, an isolated theological college on the Norfolk coast which is thrown intoturmoil by a grisly and sacrilegious murder in its chapel; in Original Sin, an old-fashioned gentlemanly publishing firm is disturbed by the killing of its managing director. The sensitive and humane Dalgliesh has more in common with the amateur detectives of past eras than the streetwise coppers of today's crime fiction. Yet James's books do not share the unthreatening cosiness that characterizes so many of the novels of the Golden Age. The crimes they describe in unflinching detail are brutal and bloody, the threats to the social order they represent are very real. In long, leisurely yet utterly gripping narratives like A Taste for Death, P.D. James combines all the virtues of the classic English detective story with a psychological realism and an awareness of the disruptive power of violence that is entirely contemporary.

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