P.D. James Books In Order

Adam Dalgliesh Books In Publication Order

  1. Cover Her Face (1962)
  2. A Mind to Murder (1963)
  3. Unnatural Causes (1967)
  4. Shroud for a Nightingale (1971)
  5. The Black Tower (1975)
  6. Death of an Expert Witness (1977)
  7. A Taste for Death (1986)
  8. Devices and Desires (1989)
  9. Original Sin (1994)
  10. A Certain Justice (1997)
  11. Death in Holy Orders (2001)
  12. The Murder Room (2003)
  13. The Lighthouse (2005)
  14. The Private Patient (2008)

Cordelia Gray Books In Publication Order

  1. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)
  2. The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982)

Standalone Novels In Publication Order

  1. Innocent Blood (1980)
  2. The Children of Men (1992)
  3. Death Comes to Pemberley (2012)

Short Stories/Novellas In Publication Order

  1. The Part-Time Job (2005)
  2. The Victim (2019)

Short Story Collections In Publication Order

  1. The Mistletoe Murder (2016)
  2. Sleep No More (2017)

Non-Fiction Books In Publication Order

  1. The Maul and The Pear Tree (With: T.A. Critchley) (1971)
  2. Time To Be In Earnest (1999)
  3. Talking About Detective Fiction (2009)
  4. P.D. James in Her Own Words (2017)

Anthologies In Publication Order

  1. Great Law and Order Stories (1990)
  2. Tales of Obsession (1994)
  3. The Detection Collection (2005)

Adam Dalgliesh Book Covers

Cordelia Gray Book Covers

Standalone Novels Book Covers

Short Stories/Novellas Book Covers

Short Story Collections Book Covers

Non-Fiction Book Covers

Anthologies Book Covers

P.D. James Books Overview

A Mind to Murder

When the administrative head of the Steen Psychiatric Clinic is found dead with a chisel in her heart, Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard is called in to investigate. Dalgliesh must analyze the deep seated anxieties and thwarted desires of patients and staff alike to determine which of their unresolved conflicts resulted in murder. With ‘discernment, depth, and craftsmanship,’ wrote the Chicago Daily News, A Mind to Murder ‘is a superbly satisfying mystery.’

Unnatural Causes

A famous mystery writer is found dead at the bottom of a dinghy, with both hands chopped off at the wrists. Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh, with help from his remarkable Aunt Jane, must discover who typed the writer’s death sentence before the plot takes another murderous turn. Unnatural Causes inspired Cosmopolitan to fervently hope, ‘if we’re lucky, there will always be an England and there will always be a P. D. James.’

Shroud for a Nightingale

An Adam Dalgliesh mystery by an award winning, internationally acclaimed novelist. Two student nurses lie dead, the great hospital nursing school of Nightingale House is shadowed with terror, and a secret medical world of sex, shame, and scandal is about to be exposed. It is the job of Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard to probe even deeper into the macabre mystery and unmask a killer who operates as skillfully as a surgeon before the epidemic of evil gets completely out of hand. From the Paperback edition.

The Black Tower

P.D. James is reknowned for her ability to combine the psychological novel with the classic murder mystery but now and then her emphasis on psychology so overshadows her plot that it becomes hard to describe the work as a murder mystery per se. Such is the case with The Black Tower, a profoundly bleak novel set in an isolated home for ‘the young disabled,’ a euphemistic term for victims of slowly progressing but ultimately fatal muscular disease. The story begins when Inspector Dalgliesh, himself recovering from both a serious illness and a crisis of confidence, is invited to Toynton Grange by the home’s elderly chaplin; something is amiss, and the chaplin would welcome Dalgliesh’s advice. But when Dalgliesh arrives, he finds his old friend has died a few days earlier. With little to go on except his own suspicion, Dalgliesh slowly, grudingly begins to investigate…
and finds one suspicious death after another. The premise is a classic set up, but in this novel James places Dalgliesh more as an observer of the inevitable than as a detective, and when the solution arrives it does so more by intuition and assumption than by logical deduction. But if this element is weak, the overall novel is very strong: moody to the point of despair, and peopled with painfully pitiful characters, THE DARK TOWER is perhaps one of James’ more memorable novels in terms of style alone. Flawed, yes; recommended nonetheless. But be forewarned: you may need prescription medication to escape the sense of depression the novel creates.

Death of an Expert Witness

Dr. Lorrimer appeared to be the picture of a bloodless, coldly efficient scientist. Only when his brutally slain body is discovered and his secret past dissected does the image begin to change. Once again, Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh learns that there is more to human beings than meets the eye and more to solving a murder than the obvious clues. From the Paperback edition.

A Taste for Death

When the quiet Little Vestry of St. Matthew’s Church becomes the blood soaked scene of a double murder, Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgliesh faces an intriguing conundrum: How did an upper crust Minister come to lie, slit throat to slit throat, next to a neighborhood derelict of the lowest order? Challenged with the investigation of a crime that appears to have endless motives, Dalgliesh explores the sinister web spun around a half burnt diary and a violet eyed widow who is pregnant and full of malice all the while hoping to fill the gap of logic that joined these two disparate men in bright red death…
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Devices and Desires

National Bestseller Featuring the famous Commander Adam Dalgliesh, Devices and Desires is a thrilling and insightfully crafted novel of fallible people caught in a net of secrets, ambitions, and schemes on a lonely stretch of Norfolk coastline. Commander Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard has just published a new book of poems and has taken a brief respite from publicity on the remote Larksoken headland on the Norfolk coast in a converted windmill left to him by his aunt. But he cannot so easily escape murder. A psychotic strangler of young women is at large in Norfolk, and getting nearer to Larksoken with every killing. And when Dalgliesh discovers the murdered body of the Acting Administrative Officer on the beach, he finds himself caught up in the passions and dangerous secrets of the headland community and in one of the most baffling murder cases of his career.

Original Sin

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. 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.

A Certain Justice

12 cassettes / 15 1/2 hoursUnabridgedRead by Michael Jayston’A masterpiece…
worth every penny.’ USA Today about the unabridged AudioBook, A Certain Justice. It begins, dramatically enough, with a trial for murder. The distinguished criminal lawyer Venetia Aldridge is defending Garry Ashe on charges of having brutally killed his aunt. For Aldridge the trial is mainly a test of her courtroom skills, one more opportunity to succeed, and she does. But now murder is in the air. The next victim will be Aldridge herself, stabbed to death at her desk in her Chambers in the Middle Temple. Enter Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team, whose struggle to investigate and understand the shocking events cannot halt the spiral into more horrors, more murders…
A Certain Justice is P.D. James at her strongest. In her first foray into the strange closed world of the Law Courts and the London legal community, she has created a fascinating tale of interwoven passion and terror. As each scene draws us forward into new complexities of plot, she proves yet again that no other writer can match her skill in combining the excitement of the classic detective story with the richness of a fine novel. In its subtle portrayal of morality and human behavior A Certain Justice will stand alongside Devices and Desires and A Taste for Death as on of P.D. James’s most important, accomplished and entertaining works.

Death in Holy Orders

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. 19Forecast: With a 300,000 copy first printing, this BOMC main selection is sure to race up the bestseller lists.

The Murder Room

Commander Adam Dalgliesh, P. D. James’s formidable and fascinating detective, returns to find himself enmeshed in a terrifying story of passion and mystery and in love. The Dupayne, a small private museum in London devoted to the interwar years 1919 1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is brutally and mysteriously murdered. Yet even as Commander Dalgliesh and his team proceed with their investigation, a second corpse is discovered. Someone in the Dupayne is prepared to kill and kill again. Still more sinister, the murders appear to echo the notorious crimes of the past featured in one of the museum s galleries: The Murder Room. The case is fraught with danger and complications from the outset, but for Dalgliesh the complications are unexpectedly profound. His new relationship with Emma Lavenham introduced in the last Dalgliesh novel, Death in Holy Orders is at a critical stage. Now, as he moves closer and closer to a solution to the puzzle, he finds himself driven further and further from commitment to the woman he loves. The Murder Room is a powerful work of mystery and psychological intricacy from a master of the modern novel. You can t possibly know him. I can know enough, Emma said. I can t know everything, no one can. Loving him doesn t give me the right to walk in and out of his mind as if it were my room at college. He s the most private person I ve ever met. But I know the things about him that matter. But did she? Emma asked herself. Adam Dalgleish was intimate with those dark crevices of the human mind where horrors lurked which she couldn t begin to comprehend. Not even that appalling scene in the church at St. Anselm s had shown her the worst that human beings could do to each other. She knew about those horrors from literature; he explored them daily in his work. Sometimes, waking from sleep in the early hours, the vision she had of him was of the dark face masked, the hands smooth and impersonal in the sleek latex gloves. What hadn t those hands touched? She rehearsed the questions she wondered if she would ever be able to ask. Why do you do it? Is it necessary to your poetry? Why did you choose this job? Or did it choose you? from The Murder Room

The Lighthouse

A subtle and powerful work of contemporary fiction. Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery quickly and discreetly, but at a difficult time for him and his depleted team. Dalgliesh is uncertain about his future with Emma Lavenham, the woman he loves; Detective Inspector Kate Miskin has her own emotional problems; and the ambitious Sergeant Francis Benton Smith is worried about working under Kate. Hardly has the team begun to unravel the complicated motives of the suspects than there is a second brutal killing, and the whole investigation is jeopardized when Dalgliesh is faced with a danger more insidious and as potentially fatal as murder. This eagerly awaited successor to the international bestseller The Murder Room displays all the qualities that lovers of P. D. James’s novels the world over have come to expect: sensitive characterization, an exciting and superbly structured plot and vivid evocation of place. From the Hardcover edition.

The Private Patient

Cheverell Manor is a lovely old house in deepest Dorset, now a private clinic belonging to the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler Powell. When investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn arrived there one late autumn afternoon, scheduled to have a disfiguring and long standing facial scar removed, she had every expectation of a successful operation and a pleasant week recuperating. Two days later she was dead, the victim of murder. To Commander Adam Dalgliesh, who with his team is called in to investigate the case, the mystery at first seems absolute. Few things about it make sense. Yet as the detectives begin probing the lives and backgrounds of those connected with the dead woman the surgeon, members of the manor staff, close acquaintances suspects multiply all too rapidly. New confusions arise, including strange historical overtones of madness and a lynching 350 years in the past. Then there is a second murder, and Dalgliesh finds himself confronted by issues even more challenging than innocence or guilt.P. D. James has gained an enviable reputation for creating detective stories of uncommon depth and intricacy, combined with the sort of humanity and perceptiveness found only in the finest novelists. The Private Patient ranks among her very best.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

Handsome Cambridge dropout Mark Callender died hanging by the neck with a faint trace of lipstick on his mouth. When the official verdict is suicide, his wealthy father hires fledgling private investigator Cordelia Gray to find out what led him to self destruction. What she discovers instead is a twisting trail of secrets and sins, and the strong scent of murder. ‘An Unsuitable Job for a Woman‘ introduces P. D. James’s courageous but vulnerable young detective, Cordelia Gray, in a ‘top rated puzzle of peril that holds you all the way’ ‘The New York Times’.

The Skull Beneath the Skin

P. D. James is ‘the reigning mistress of murder.’ ‘Time’ Private detective Cordelia Gray is invited to the sunlit island of Courcy to protect the vainly beautiful actress Clarissa Lisle from veiled threats on her life. Within the rose red walls of a fairy tale castle, she finds the stage is set for death. ‘Richly intricate and literate,’ James’s second Cordelia Gray mystery ‘shows James at the height of her story telling powers’ ‘San Francisco Chronicle.’

Innocent Blood

Adopted as a child into a privileged family, Philippa Palfrey fantasizes that she is the daughter of an aristocrat and a parlor maid. The terrifying truth about her parents and a long ago murder is only the first in a series of shocking betrayals. Philippa quickly learns that those who delve into the secrets of the past must be on guard when long buried horrors begin to stir. ‘As a crime novel,’ wrote the London Times, Innocent Blood is ‘the peak of the art.’ ‘Flawlessly crafted…
profoundly, masterfully moving,’ Cosmopolitan concurred.

The Children of Men

Told with P. D. James’s trademark suspense, insightful characterization, and riveting storytelling, The Children of Men is a story of a world with no children and no future. The human race has become infertile, and the last generation to be born is now adult. Civilization itself is crumbling as suicide and despair become commonplace. Oxford historian Theodore Faron, apathetic toward a future without a future, spends most of his time reminiscing. Then he is approached by Julian, a bright, attractive woman who wants him to help get her an audience with his cousin, the powerful Warden of England. She and her band of unlikely revolutionaries may just awaken his desire to live…
and they may also hold the key to survival for the human race. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Death Comes to Pemberley

A rare meeting of literary genius: P. D. James, long among the most admired mystery writers of our time, draws the characters of Jane Austen’s beloved novel Pride and Prejudice into a tale of murder and emotional mayhem. It is 1803, six years since Elizabeth and Darcy embarked on their life together at Pemberley, Darcy s magnificent estate. Their peaceful, orderly world seems almost unassailable. Elizabeth has found her footing as the chatelaine of the great house. They have two fine sons, Fitzwilliam and Charles. Elizabeth s sister Jane and her husband, Bingley, live nearby; her father visits often; there is optimistic talk about the prospects of marriage for Darcy s sister Georgiana. And preparations are under way for their much anticipated annual autumn ball. Then, on the eve of the ball, the patrician idyll is shattered. A coach careens up the drive carrying Lydia, Elizabeth s disgraced sister, who with her husband, the very dubious Wickham, has been banned from Pemberley. She stumbles out of the carriage, hysterical, shrieking that Wickham has been murdered. With shocking suddenness, Pemberley is plunged into a frightening mystery. Inspired by a lifelong passion for Austen, P. D. James masterfully re creates the world of Pride and Prejudice, electrifying it with the excitement and suspense of a brilliantly crafted crime story, as only she can write it. From the Hardcover edition.

The Maul and The Pear Tree (With: T.A. Critchley)

In this riveting true crime account, acclaimed author P. D. James, the ‘Queen of the English mystery novel’ Newsweek joins forces with historian T. A. Critchley to re create the Radcliffe Highway murders, a series of vicious crimes committed in 1811…
The scene is the London Docks near Wapping Old Stairs, a sinister neighborhood where pirates were often hanged. The first victims were two hardworking shopkeepers, along with their baby and shop boy. Twelve days later and only a few blocks away, an equally blameless pub owner was found together with his wife and servant, victims of equal cruelty and apparent absence of motive. The serial killings provoked nationwide notoriety and panic. With the atmosphere and pacing of her best novels, James reveals the rudimentary police system of Regency London coping with a major murder investigation and crimes that rank up there with Jack the Ripper, the Boston Strangler, and Son of Sam as the very symbol of murderous and unthinking brutality.

Time To Be In Earnest

On the day she turned seventy seven, internationally acclaimed mystery writer P. D. James embarked on an endeavor unlike any other in her distinguished career: she decided to write a personal memoir in the form of a diary. Over the course of a year she set down not only the events and impressions of her extraordinarily active life, but also the memories, joys, discoveries, and crises of a lifetime. This enchantingly original volume is the result. Time To Be In Earnest offers an intimate portrait of one of most accomplished women of our time. Here are vivid, revealing accounts of her school days in Cambridge in the 1920s and ’30s, her happy marriage and the tragedy of her husband’s mental illness, and the thrill of publishing her first novel, Cover Her Face, in 1962. As she recounts the decades of her exceptional life, James holds forth with wit and candor on such diverse subjects as the evolution of the detective novel, her deep love of the English countryside, her views of author tours and television adaptations, and her life long obsession with Jane Austen. Wise and frank, engaging and graceful, this ‘fragment of autobiography’ will delight and surprise P. D. James’s admirers the world over.

Talking About Detective Fiction

In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dickens’s Bleak House and Wilkie Collins s The Woman in White, and bringing us into the present with such writers as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie arch breaker of rules , Josephine Tey, Dashiell Hammett, and Peter Lovesey, among many others. She traces their lives into and out of their fiction, clarifies their individual styles, and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they ve created, from Sherlock Holmes to Sara Paretsky s sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American Golden Age mystery writing. She discusses detective fiction as social history, the stylistic components of the genre, her own process of writing, how critics have reacted over the years, and what she sees as a renewal of detective fiction and of the detective hero in recent years. There is perhaps no one who could write about this enduring genre of storytelling with equal authority and flair: it is essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.

Great Law and Order Stories

The creator of the irrepressible barrister sleuth, Rumpole of the Old Bailey, presents a superb collection of classic tales of mystery and suspense. With stories by such authors as P.D. James and Charles Dickens, Conan Doyle and Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe and John Mortimer himself, this anthology explores new dimensions in crime writing.

Tales of Obsession

Fourteen spine tingling stories of suspense include P. D. James’s ”The Victim,” in which a gorgeous celebrity uses her infatuated ex husband as a murder weapon, and tales by Ruth Rendell, Patricia Highsmith, and other authors.

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