Death in Holy Orders (Hardcover)

Praise for Death in Holy Orders:

“Baroness James of Holland Park has lost none of her power as a storyteller. Death in Holy Orders is a great novel about Heaven, Hell, death and judgment — her best, in fact, since the superb A Taste for Death…[I]t is a murder mystery, and a right nicely plotted and planned one one at that. But fans of P.D. James have known for years that the murder is just the edge of the sotry. There’s always more…. As always, James leaves room for repentance, redemption and reconciliation…. James belongs to that great school of authors who write about ideas and images and problems such as the persistence of evil and the reality of Heaven. This is a good mystery novel, but like the novels of Dickens or Trollope, it's also more. It is a great novel of morals and ideas, written by a woman who has always thought morality worth the effort.” —The Globe and Mail

“English veteran P.D. James deserves her usual accolades and then some with the publication of Death In Holy Orders. James is a delight to read, a writer in love with the language as much as her characters and her detailed plots…This is an exquisite book, perfect in its details.” —Winnipeg Free Press

“With Death in Holy Orders, the fabled British author, now 80, has delivered the clerical goods once more — even amidst renewed rumours of retirement…Although a new breed of English female crime writers…has muscled into the mystery aisles, crime lovers still deserve another lesson from the remarkable, thoroughly British Baroness James.” —Ottawa Citizen

“Character, plot and setting take equal part in the work of P.D. James, and never have they been in greater supply than in Death in Holy Orders… Most of the rest of us will marvel that a story of such baroque intricacies can be resolved in any way at all, and will be dazzled by the way James keeps all her characters moving with only deliberate collisions….The classic detective story ends with the restoration of order. But here James…goes beyond restoration to reconciliation in an epilogue which…affirm[s] the great virtues of faith, hope and probably love.” —New York Times Book Review

“P.D. James’ latest mystery novel, Death In Holy Orders, reconfirms her place high in the panoply of contemporary crime writers…James brilliantly assembles a congregation of possible suspects, lines up masses of motives and even creates a cunning version of the classic ‘locked-room mystery.’ As always, there are countless opportunities to reach wrong conclusions, a plethora of fascinating sub-plots to divert and multiple red herrings to assess. One of the several pleasures offered by James’s fiction is the inevitable workout of the reader’s vocabulary and the detailed background data she scatters through the story…This is a book to be savoured slowly.” —National Post

Praise for P.D. James:
"A first-class novelist...with literary flair and an eye as perceptive as her heart." —The New York Times Book Review

"[James's] hallmarks: elegance of language; a stellar sense of place, exquisitely defined characters; and skillfully rendered tale[s] of moral justice." —The Globe and Mail

"An addictive writer...a superior novelist." —The Spectator

On a desolate stretch of the East Anglian coast, high atop a sweep of cliffs, sits the theological college of St. Anselm's. Down below, smothered by a fall of sand, lies the body of a young ordinand, the son of a powerful business mogul who wants Scotland Yard to investigate his death. Dalgliesh, doubting there is much to uncover in the case, agrees to go, motivated only by a desire to revisit a place where he spent several happy summers in his boyhood. Yet no sooner does he arrive than the college is torn apart by a sacrilegious murder and Dalgliesh finds himself embroiled in one of the most puzzling and horrific cases of his career: no one is above suspicion, and suspects abound.

Elevated beyond the great classic detective stories of the Golden Age by the power of the writing, Death in Holy Orders grips and moves us from beginning to end, blessed with extraordinary psychological and emotional richness. The memorable characters and the wonderfully evoked wild coastal setting and religious world in which the action takes place demonstrate yet again why P.D. James ranks as one of the great novelists of our time.