Original Sin (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #9) - Hardcover

Reviews

A sprawling paean to the Thames River and its London environs, James's 12th novel and latest mystery to feature New Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgleish is set in the modern publishing world where traditions may crumble but where such timeless emotions as grief, rage and love prevail. Peverell Press, which occupies the magnificent Innocent House, modeled on the palaces of Venice and built by the firm's founder in 1792, has been plagued by the misdeeds-misplaced manuscripts, lost illustrations-of an unknown "office menace" since the death, nine months earlier, of managing director Henry Peverell. The stakes are upped when a senior editor, recently sacked by the new director Gerard Etienne, kills herself. When Etienne is found dead in the same room, Dalgleish is called in to investigate. He discovers that plenty of people, including the four other partners in the firm and various employees whose jobs are threatened by Etienne's plans to sell Innocent House and modernize the firm, had reason to wish Etienne dead. James (Devices and Desires) gives pride of place here to lush, leisurely descriptions of waterside London and the landscape of the Essex coast; Dalgleish and his assistants seem more observers than participants in this plot that ticks along on its own momentum, driven by the various suspects' motivations and actions to the credible, if not fully prepared for, resolution. BOMC selection; Random House Large Print edition (ISBN 0-679-76033-4); author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Like a poet committed to sonnets in an age of free verse, P. D. James continues to show the younger, more rambunctious crime writers (Hiaasen, Dibdin, Ellroy) that there's still some life left in the classical detective story. Of course, it helps when the sleuth injecting most of that life is the inimitable, ever-suave Adam Dalgleish, critically acclaimed poet and Scotland Yard commander. Both of Dalgleish's vocations come into play here, at least tangentially, as the murders in question take place at one of London's oldest publishing houses, Peverell Press, located on the banks of the Thames in a Venetian-style mansion called, ironically, Innocent House. A slumping frontlist is the least of the problems at this once-distinguished press: its senior staff is being bumped off faster than a copy editor can blue-pencil a dangling participle. James has created a classic country-house mystery here, with the house transported to the city and the five partners at Peverell Press taking the roles of the landed gentry. One of the surviving four, after the managing director turns up dead, is clearly a killer, and James expertly constructs believable scenarios that might convict any of them. And don't forget the subplot: in this case, the personal crises of Dalgleish's two lieutenant's, Kate Miskin, choosing career over love, and Daniel Aaron, letting his ties to his family and his Jewish heritage slip away.

All the pieces of the puzzle are in place, and James plays them with careful attention to the rigors of formula, yet the novel is always more than its form, just as the best sonnets are more than 14 lines of tightly controlled rhymes. As we learn about the various suspects, we're not just building scenarios and detecting red herrings; we're also learning about people, observing their frailties, recognizing their illusions, and, above all, feeling their pain. Order is always restored at the end of a James novel, as formula requires, yet it is never without an overpowering sense of loss. Perhaps that is the real mark of James' genius and her enduring popularity in a very un-classical age: she gives us the comfort of the classical detective story, but it comes at a price, a quiet reminder that order--however we crave it--rarely penetrates the human heart. Bill Ott