Original Sin (Adam Dalgliesh Series #9)

by P. D. James

Overview

Adam Dalgliesh takes on a baffling murder in the rarefied world of London book publishing in this masterful mystery from one of our finest novelists. • Part of the bestselling mystery series that inspired Dalgliesh on Acorn TV

“Complex and compelling.... James is writing in full mastery of her craft.”—The New York Times Book Review

Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of impenetrable complexity. A murder has taken place in the offices of the Peverell Press, a venerable London publishing house located in a dramatic mock-Venetian palace on the Thames. The victim is Gerard Etienne, the brilliant but ruthless new managing director, who had vowed to restore the firm's fortunes. Etienne was clearly a man with enemies—a discarded mistress, a rejected and humiliated author, and rebellious colleagues, one of who apparently killed herself a short time earlier. Yet Etienne's death, which occurred under bizarre circumstances, is for Dalgliesh only the beginning of the mystery, as he desperately pursues the search for a killer prepared to strike and strike again.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780307455574
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/14/2009
Series:	Adam Dalgliesh Series , #9
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.02(h) x 0.98(d)

About the Author

P. D. James was the author of twenty books, many of which feature her detective hero Adam Dalgliesh and have been televised or filmed. She was the recipient of many honors, including the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature, and in 1991 was created Baroness James of Holland Park. She died in 2014.

Hometown:

London, England

Date of Birth:

August 3, 1920

Place of Birth:

Oxford, England

Education:

Attended the Cambridge High School for Girls from 1931 to 1937 and later took evening classes in hospital administration

Read an Excerpt

Blessed and cursed with an enormous amount of advance hype from the British press, the Strokes proved they were one of the few groups deserving of glowing reviews with Is This It. Granted, their faultless influences -- especially the Stooges, Lou Reed, and the Velvet Underground -- have "critics' darlings" written all over them. However, the Strokes don't rehash the sounds that inspire them; they remake them in their own image. The band's pop-inflected, second-generation take on late-'70s New York punk comes complete with raw, world-weary vocals, spiky guitars, and an insistently chugging backbeat that all sound familiar, but the songs on their debut album also reflect their own early-twenties lust for life. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Julian Casablancas and the rest of the band mix swaggering self-assurance with barely concealed insecurity on "The Modern Age" and reveal something akin to earnestness on "Barely Legal"'s soaring choruses. The group revamps "Lust for Life" on "New York City Cops" and combines their raw power and infectious melodies on "Hard to Explain," one of their finest songs. Nearly half of {|Is This It|} consists of their previously released material, but that's not really a disappointment since those songs are so strong. What makes their debut impressive, however, is that the new material more than holds its own with the tried-and-true songs. {|"Is This It"|} sets the highs and lows of being young, jaded, and yearning to a wonderfully bouncy bassline; {|"Alone Together"|} and {|"Trying Your Luck"|} develop the group's brooding comedowns, while {|"Soma,"|} {|"Someday,"|} and {|"Take It or Leave It"|} capture {|the Strokes|} at their most sneeringly exuberant. Able to make the timeworn themes of sex, drugs, and {|rock & roll|} and the basic guitars-drum-bass lineup seem new and vital again, {|the Strokes|} may or may not be completely arty and calculated, but that doesn't prevent {|Is This It|} from being an exciting, compulsively listenable debut. [In light of the World Trade Center disaster, the track {|"New York City Cops"|} was pulled from the U.S. release]. ~ Heather Phares

Table of Contents

Book One: Foreword to Murder

Book Two: Death of a Publisher

Book Three: Work in Progress

Book Four: Evidence in Writing

Book Five: Final Proof

Editorial Reviews

Complex and compelling.... James is writing in full mastery of her craft.”—The New York Times Book Review

“One of James's best novels.... James transcends literary classification.”—Chicago Sun-Times

“The queen of the British murder mystery demonstrates why the crown is hers.”—Newsday

“One of James's most savory fictions.... A marvelous tale.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“One of her most enjoyable and vigorous novels.”—The Plain Dealer

From the Publisher

Happily, the extraordinary richness of P.D. James’s characterizations exactly coincides with John Franklyn-Robbins’s strength as a narrator. His reading skillfully explores the essential traits of each character whether acidic, pompous, generous or--as is true of everyone in a P.D. James work--needy. What’s more, with a change of inflection or pacing, Franklyn-Robbins illuminates the understated ironies and humor always embedded in a James mystery. You can almost see Franklyn-Robbins’s raised eyebrow. In this outing, Commander Adam Dalgliesh sorts through the death of the ruthless director of an august London publishing house and its crosscurrents of love, ambition and malice. M.O. ©AudioFile, Portland, Maine

OCT 96 - AudioFile