's Best of 2001
Despite challenges from Ruth Rendell and (more recently) Minette Walters, P.D. James's position as Britain's Queen of Crime remains largely unassailable. Although a certain reaction has set in to her reputation (and there are those who claim her poetry-loving copper Adam Dalgliesh doesn't correspond to any of his counterparts in the real world), her detractors can scarcely deny her astonishing literary gifts. More than any other writer, she has elevated the detective story into the realms of literature, with the psychology of the characters treated in the most complex and authoritative fashion. Her plots, too, are full of intriguing detail and studed with brilliantly observed character studies. Who cares if Dalgliesh belongs more in the pages of a book than poking around a graffiti-scrawled council estate? As a policeman, he is considerably more plausible than Doyle's Holmes, and that's never stopped us loving the Baker Street sleuth. Death in Holy Orders represents something of a challenge from James to her critics, taking on all the contentious elements and rigorously reinvigorating them. She had admitted that she was finding it increasingly difficult to find new plots for Dalgliesh, and the locale here (a theological college on a lonely stretch of the East Anglian coast) turns out to be an inspired choice. We're presented with the enclosed setting so beloved of golden age detective writers, and James is able to incorporate her theological interests seamlessly into the plot (but never in any doctrinaire way; the nonbeliever is never uncomfortable). The body of a student at the college is found on the shore, suffocated by a fall of sand. Dalgliesh is called upon to reexamine the verdict of accidental death (which the student's father would not accept). Having visited the College of St. Anselm in his boyhood, he finds the investigation has a strong nostalgic aspect for him. But that is soon overtaken by the realization that he has encountered the most horrific case of his career, and another visitor to the college dies a horrible death. As an exploration of evil--and as a piece of highly distinctive crime writing--this is James at her nonpareil best. Dalgliesh, too, is rendered with new dimensions of psychological complexity. --Barry Forshaw, Amazon.co.uk


From Publishers Weekly
Baroness James may have turned 80, but neither she nor her dogged Scotland Yard detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh (last seen in 1997's A Certain Justice) shows any sign of flagging in this superb whodunit, with its extraordinarily complex and nuanced plot and large cast of credible characters. When the body of a young ordinand, Ronald Treeves, turns up buried in a sandy bank on the Suffolk coast near isolated St. Anselm's, a High Anglican theological college, it's unclear whether his death was an accident, suicide or murder. The mystery deepens a few days later when someone suffocates Margaret Munroe, a retired nurse with a bad heart, because she remembers an event 12 years earlier that could have some bearing on whatever's amiss at St. Anselm's. Enter Dalgliesh at the behest of Ronald's father, Sir Alred, who's received an anonymous note suggesting foul play in his son's death. It isn't long before another death occurs, and this time it's clearly murder: late one night in the chapel, somebody bashes in the head of Archdeacon Crampton, a hard-nosed outsider who wanted to close St. Anselm's. Dalgliesh and his investigative team examine the complicated motives of a host of suspects resident at the college, mostly ordinands and priests, slowly unveiling the connections among the various deaths. Illegitimacy, incest, a secret marriage, a missing cloak and a valuable altar triptych are just some of the ingredients in a case as contrived as any Golden Age classic but presented with such masterful ease and conviction that even the most skeptical readers will suspend disbelief. This is a natural for PBS Mystery adaptation. (Apr. 19)Forecast: With a 300,000-copy first printing, this BOMC main selection is sure to race up the bestseller lists.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A Victorian mansion situated on a lonely cliff along the English coast. Guests, welcome and unwelcome, gathered for a long weekend. A dark and stormy night. A shocking murder in a locked room. James combines all the elements of the classic English detective story in her first Adam Dalgliesh mystery since A Certain Justice (LJ 11/1/97). Asked by a wealthy businessman to investigate the "accidental" death of his adopted son Ronald, a student at a small theological college in East Anglia, Dalgliesh willingly returns to St. Anselm's, where he had spent happy summers as a teenager. But what was a casual investigation turns into official police business when the archdeacon, another weekend visitor, is found brutally murdered in the locked church. Is his killing related to Ronald's death or to the recent fatal "heart attack" of the housekeeper who discovered Ronald's body? Or was the archdeacon murdered because he threatened to close the college down? In their usual methodical and careful manner, Dagliesh and his team, Detective Inspectors Kate Miskin and Piers Tarrant, seek answers and a murderer. Despite the too-obvious red herrings and plot contrivances, this is still an enjoyable read to be savored on chilly evenings with a cup of hot tea.- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal" Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
Adam Dalgliesh is summoned to the college of St. Anselm's to investigate the death of the son of a powerful businessman. Having spent the summers of his youth in East Anglia, Dalgliesh agrees to revisit the school only to be met with more murder and mystery. Charles Keating sets a quiet, funereal tone in his reading to impress us with the religious atmosphere of the story. Apart from the dialogue, in which he bestows personality to each character, he maintains the somber tone as a scenic background to the action. Were the first chapter read by a woman, to clarify the position of that character in the novel, the listener would be less bewildered by the subsequent shift in point of view and the novel would offer more color to its audience. J.P. © AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
With her fascination for murder within tightly knit communities, it seems surprising that James waited until her fifteenth novel to look for trouble within the clergy. You won't find a more tightly knit community than a Church of England theological college, especially one like the fictional St. Anselm's, located on the wild East Anglian coast, and you certainly won't find a cast of characters with more repressed passions and seething emotions than a group of aging priests and young ordinands. When one of those ordinands turns up dead on the beach--ruled an accident but looking more like suicide--the young man's industrialist father senses a cover-up and asks for an investigation. Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh has ties to East Anglia, and even to St. Anselm's, where he spent summers as a boy, so he volunteers to look into the matter informally. On the heels of Dalgliesh's arrival, however, a visiting priest (who supports shutting down the college) is murdered in the chapel, necessitating a full-scale investigation. James makes the most of her setting, giving us fascinating backstory on the priests, their students, and various visitors to the college--most of whom have sufficient motives for murder. Longtime fans of the series will be especially pleased to find that Dalgliesh emerges from the ordeal with the possibility of a serious romance on the horizon. This isn't the best James novel--there is perhaps a bit too much reliance on formula here and slightly less on the nuances of character--but that said, the chance to spend another few hours with the ever-shrewd, melancholy Dalgliesh remains something to savor. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
A number of traditions come seamlessly together in P. D. James's Death in Holy Orders, another of her acclaimed mysteries featuring Scotland Yard's Commander Adam Dalgliesh. Included among those traditions are the Golden Age detective story, the police procedural, the literary gothic, and the Victorian novel, with its stately prose, leisurely pacing, and abundant supply of social, familial, and psychological detail. The result of this eclectic combination is a multilayered narrative that works both as a murder mystery and as a complex meditation on faith, love, loyalty, vengeance, and personal responsibility.

The bulk of the novel takes place at St. Anselm's, an embattled, isolated theological college on England's windswept East Anglian coast. When the body of seminarian Ronald Treeves is literally unearthed from a suffocating pile of sand, a coroner's jury turns in a verdict of accidental death. Arms manufacturer Sir Alred Treeves, Ronald's adoptive father, questions the verdict and arranges to have Dalgliesh reinvestigate the boy's death.

Dalgliesh arrives at St. Anselm's at a particularly troubled moment. A longtime employee of the college has just died of an apparent heart attack, and a number of outside visitors have arrived to spend a restful rural weekend. Among the guests are a pair of visiting academics, a policeman on the verge of a breakdown, and Archdeacon Matthew Crampton, an ambitious cleric with a guilty secret and a vested interest in closing down the college. Crampton has had a history of hostile encounters, both with fellow guests and with various members of the seminary staff. On the morning after his arrival, his body is found, savagely beaten, in the sanctified precincts of St. Anselm's Church.

As Dalgliesh soon learns, a great many of the weekend visitors had motives for murdering the archdeacon. Surrounding himself with a picked crew of Scotland Yard regulars, Dalgliesh spearheads a wide-ranging investigation that illuminates the events behind Crampton's death by first exposing the buried secrets of several interconnected lives. In the end, Dalgliesh -- poet, sleuth, and solitary widower -- successfully identifies a resourceful killer and opens himself up to the possibility of romantic and spiritual renewal.

Death in Holy Orders is an engaging, old-fashioned, morally attractive novel by an 80-year-old master of the craft who continues to write with grace, clarity, and psychological acuity. At an age when most writers have long since passed their creative peaks, James has given us a fresh, quietly enthralling novel that raises large, important questions and solidifies its author's position as one of the dominant figures of late-20th-century crime fiction. (Bill Sheehan)

Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Death in Holy Orders is set in an Anglican theological college on a desolate stretch of the East Anglian coast, a locality which she has made particularly her own. When the body of the one of the students is found on the shore smothered by a fall of sand, his weathly father demands that Scotland Yard should re-examine the verdict of accidental death. Commander Dalgliesh has visited St. Anselm's in his boyhood and, as he is due for a holiday, agrees to pay a visit, expecting no more than a nostaglic return to old haunts and a straightforward examination of the evidence given at the inquest. Instead he finds himself embroiled in one of the most horrific and puzzling cases of his career. Other visitors come to the college on the weekend of his arrival, not all of them with benign intent. One of them will never leave it alive."--BOOK JACKET.

SYNOPSIS

The setting itself is elemental P. D. James: the bleak coast of East Anglia, where atop a sweep of low cliffs stands the small theological college of St. Anselm's. On the shore not far away, smothered beneath a fall of sand, lies the body of one of the school's young ordinands.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Baroness James may have turned 80, but neither she nor her dogged Scotland Yard detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh (last seen in 1997's A Certain Justice) shows any sign of flagging in this superb whodunit, with its extraordinarily complex and nuanced plot and large cast of credible characters. When the body of a young ordinand, Ronald Treeves, turns up buried in a sandy bank on the Suffolk coast near isolated St. Anselm's, a High Anglican theological college, it's unclear whether his death was an accident, suicide or murder. The mystery deepens a few days later when someone suffocates Margaret Munroe, a retired nurse with a bad heart, because she remembers an event 12 years earlier that could have some bearing on whatever's amiss at St. Anselm's. Enter Dalgliesh at the behest of Ronald's father, Sir Alred, who's received an anonymous note suggesting foul play in his son's death. It isn't long before another death occurs, and this time it's clearly murder: late one night in the chapel, somebody bashes in the head of Archdeacon Crampton, a hard-nosed outsider who wanted to close St. Anselm's. Dalgliesh and his investigative team examine the complicated motives of a host of suspects resident at the college, mostly ordinands and priests, slowly unveiling the connections among the various deaths. Illegitimacy, incest, a secret marriage, a missing cloak and a valuable altar triptych are just some of the ingredients in a case as contrived as any Golden Age classic but presented with such masterful ease and conviction that even the most skeptical readers will suspend disbelief. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard agrees to investigate the questionable death of Ronald Treeves, an ordinand at St. Anselm's College and the son of Sir Alred Treeves, a man used to having his own way. Although Ronald's death is viewed as a suicide by most of the college, Dalgliesh's investigation begins to raise some doubt. St. Anselm's is situated on the crumbling coast line of East Anglia, and, like that coast, it, too, is having difficulty standing up to the onslaught of the 20th century. However, when Archdeacon Crampton, one of St. Anselm's most vocal opponents, is found murdered in the chapel, Dalgliesh has more than one mystery to solve. James (A Certain Justice) has created yet another complex and enthralling novel. This book, with Charles Keating's admirable performance, is essential for all public libraries. Theresa Connors, Arkansas Tech Univ., Russellville Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile

Adam Dalgliesh is summoned to the college of St. Anselm's to investigate the death of the son of a powerful businessman. Having spent the summers of his youth in East Anglia, Dalgliesh agrees to revisit the school only to be met with more murder and mystery. Charles Keating sets a quiet, funereal tone in his reading to impress us with the religious atmosphere of the story. Apart from the dialogue, in which he bestows personality to each character, he maintains the somber tone as a scenic background to the action. Were the first chapter read by a woman, to clarify the position of that character in the novel, the listener would be less bewildered by the subsequent shift in point of view and the novel would offer more color to its audience. J.P. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews