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True Crime Podcast about a woman accused of murdering her best friend.

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Two days after Christmas, 2011, Russ Faria came home from game night to find his wife, Betsy, dead. He was soon charged and convicted of her murder. But Russ Faria insisted he did not kill his wife. Betsy's brutal murder set off a chain of events that would leave one man dead, another man implicated, and expose a diabolical scheme. It would also see Dateline NBC-the true-crime original-become a part of the never-ending saga that proves the old adage: Truth is stranger than fiction. This original series from Keith Morrison and Dateline defies all expectations.

Two days after Christmas, 2011, Russ Faria came home from game night to find his wife, Betsy, dead. He was soon charged and convicted of her murder. But Russ Faria insisted he did not kill his wife. Betsy's brutal murder set off a chain of events that would leave one man dead, another man implicated, and expose a diabolical scheme. It would also see Dateline NBC-the true-crime original-become a part of the never-ending saga that proves the old adage: Truth is stranger than fiction. This original series from Keith Morrison and Dateline defies all expectations.

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Two days after Christmas, 2011, Russ Faria came home from game night to find his wife, Betsy, dead. He was soon charged and convicted of her murder. But Russ Faria insisted he did not kill his wife. Betsy's brutal murder set off a chain of events that would leave one man dead, another man implicated...

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True Crime stories from Canada

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Mike Browne, host of the popular Canadian podcast Dark Poutine, chronicles some of his all-time favourite stories of true crime and dark history from Canada and around the world.

Divided into four sections -Murders with a Twist, Perpetual Puzzles, The Madness of Crowds and Notable Disasters - all the stories in this collection (except two) are brand new and haven't been covered by the podcast.

In Murders with a Twist, Browne recounts seven true crime stories with atypical elements, including weird motives, unusual perpetrators and bizarre murder weapons. In one case, we meet a man who is willing to kill to possess a human voice. In another, two women play a deadly game to prove their love to each other.

Perpetual Puzzles covers six stories that remain unresolved and will leave you with more questions than answers. They include the archaeological find of the century, which turns out to be something far more sinister, as well as the discovery of a dead man on the beach with a mysterious clue in his pocket.

The Madness of Crowds reveals that murder and mayhem are sometimes a group effort. We meet two young Canadians who leave home one summer to find work and instead end up on a murder spree, and a bizarre California cult that asks its members to topple the Mormon church.

The book concludes with Notable Disasters, which describes some of the most tragic and deadly events in history, including the deadly tsunami in the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004, as well as the devastating Grenfell Tower fire in London in June 2017.

The book includes a foreword by Alan R. Warren, bestselling true crime author and host of the House of Mystery Radio Show.

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Murder, Madness and Mayhem: Twenty-Five Tales of True Crime and Dark History

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Murder, Madness and Mayhem: Twenty-Five Tales of True Crime and Dark History [Browne, Mike] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Murder, Madness and Mayhem: Twenty-Five Tales of True Crime and Dark History

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True Crime in Canada

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The Class Project investigates the incredible murder of a mother by her two teenaged daughters. Author Bob Mitchell details the murder trial and provides a troubling look at the youth culture that not only supported the two sisters but encouraged them to commit the crime and then revel in their secret for almost a year. Through interviews with witnesses, Mitchell reveals the world in which the girls lived, exploring the social and psychological elements that influenced their actions.

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The Class Project: How to Kill a Mother: The True Story of Canada's Infamous Bathtub Girls

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The Class Project: How to Kill a Mother: The True Story of Canada's Infamous Bathtub Girls [Mitchell, Bob] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. The Class Project: How to Kill a Mother: The True Story of Canada's Infamous Bathtub Girls

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A Character-Driven Crime Fiction that is set in Philadelphia. It's described as thrilling and switches points of view between past and present, showcasing a relationship between two sisters.

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SELECTED BY BARACK OBAMA AS ONE OF HIS BEST BOOKS OF 2020 New York Times bestseller and Book of the Month 'This flawless masterpiece deserves to be a bestseller.' DAILY EXPRESS PAULA HAWKINS, author of

'Tough, tense and twisty - but tender, human and deeply affecting, too ... I don't have a sister, but when I finished the book I called my brother, just to hear his voice.'
'An outstanding crime novel.' The Girl on the Train _____________________________________ _____________________________________ DENNIS LEHANE

Once inseparable, sisters Mickey and Kacey are on different paths, but they walk the same streets. Mickey on her police beat and Kacey in the shadows of the city's darkest corners where the drug addicts and sex workers preside. When a string of murders coincides with Kacey's disappearance, Mickey is terrified her sister could be next.

But in a community where death and murder is rife, will Mickey be able to save her sister before it's too late?
'A remarkable, profoundly moving novel about the ties that bind and the irrevocable wounds of childhood. It's also a riveting mystery, perfectly paced. I loved every page of it.'
IRISH TIMES

'It is by some considerable distance my crime novel of the year' DAILY MAIL

'Outstanding . . . an intense family thriller . . . The clever plot and involving characters set a high standard for this new year.' DAILY MIRROR

'This is a thrilling and heartbreaking exploration of the strain the opioid crisis puts on families. A masterpiece.' METRO

'A dazzling, propulsive, humane work that not only bears comparison to Dennis Lehane and George Pelecanos but occasionally beats them at their own game' VOGUE

'heart-pounding thriller' INDEPENDENT

'compassionate and enthralling'

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Long Bright River [Moore Liz] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Long Bright River

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Netflix series poking fun at common thriller tropes.

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Gina Rodriguez, Damon Wayans Jr., and Tom Ellis star in the new romantic comedy.

Ambika Mod and Leo Woodall star in the adaptation of David Nicholls' novel.

By Tara Bitran and Phillipe Thao

The Oscar-nominated feature film recounts the Miracle of the Andes.

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The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window Cast, News, Videos and more

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Check out everything you've ever wanted to know about The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. Get to know the cast, watch bonus videos and so much more.

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It is a thrilling suspense novel that has elements of true crime told from the perspectives of the woman kidnapped and the serial killer's daughter.

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * GMA BUZZ PICK * A LibraryReads #1 Pick One of The Washington Post's Notable Summer Books 2023 Vogue's Best Books of 2023Books of 2023Reconstructing Amelia

One of New York Post 's Best Summer Books One of CrimeReads'
One of Goodreads's Most Anticipated Most Anticipated Books of 2023
One of One of Apple's Best Books of the Month - June 2023 - The New York Times Book Review - The Washington Post The Quiet Tenant is a daring and completely satisfying . . . bravura feat of storytelling . . . Who in her right mind would attempt a novel utilizing the first, second, and third-person? And then have the skill to actually pull it off." -James Patterson, #1 best-selling author

"An expertly paced psychological thriller . . . with a white-knuckle climax." Room , the novel takes this creepy and claustrophobic premise and spins a paradoxically expansive plot from it, told from the perspective of his victim, his daughter, and a local restaurant owner." -

"A gripping psychological suspense novel . . . Michallon's riveting tale shows a killer through the eyes of the women in his life." Observer (UK Praise)

"Clémence Michallon has written a classic on her first try. - Best Magazine (UK Praise) - Shots Magazine

"Dark and juicy . . . like Emma Donohue's (UK Praise) The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon. The story of a male serial killer called Aidan Thomas is told from multiple perspectives, in a way that centers the female voices of his victims. It's a pacy thriller and a sharp study of survival." - The Independent
"A nail-biting terror of a read, slowly revealing how Rachel, already a little bit broken, ended up where she did . . . And then following as her courage incrementally ratchets up, as brainwashed and terrified, she starts to eye, and then discard, her opportunities to escape. I finished it at very high speed, heart pounding, absolutely loving it." - (UK Praise) The Quiet Tenant is a fascinating inversion of the serial killer thriller, a story that challenges some of the genre's most prevalent and pervasive tropes through the eyes of the powerful women involved. In the process-with razor-sharp plotting and hypnotic prose-Michallon has created an unforgettable novel." - Alex Segura, author of Secret Identity
"In a small American town, single dad Aidan is regarded as a good guy, but he is hiding a secret-he is a serial killer and kidnapper, and is holding a woman captive in his shed. A chilling depiction of evil." The Quiet Tenant is a humane thriller, one that doesn't shy from asking the most difficult questions of its characters and its readers, and dares, ultimately, hopeful answers. Intelligent and suspenseful, I couldn't stop turning the pages." -Paul Tremblay, author of The Cabin at the End of the World The Quiet Tenant is an absolutely brilliant, incredibly delicious, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Imagine Jodi Picoult meets Jeffery Deaver and then watch as Clémence Michallon exceeds every one of your expectations. She's that
"Cleverly constructed, well written and harrowing in the extreme from the very first page, this is an unforgettable debut. If this is a first novel, what's the next going to be like? I dread to think literally. Congratulations to Clémence Michallon, queen of the psychological thriller. We'll be waiting." good. The book is that good. And the ending is a killer!" -Brad Thor, author of Dead Fall The Quiet Tenant is a spell-binding Trojan horse of a novel, bracing and beguiling. A dangerous man and his unforgivable crimes are its seeming center but, in Michallon's nimble hands, the novel soon reveals itself to be a story of female strength, cunning, depth, and power."
"I can recommend -Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me The Quiet Tenant is truly unforgettable. Read it." - Alafair Burke, author of The Wife The Quiet Tenant is told from the perspectives of several different women bound, both wittingly and unwittingly, to a single, terrifyingly familiar predator. A mystery that is at once riveting and heartrending, The Quiet Tenant is a sharply insightful look at what it means to live and love as a woman in this harrowing world. It is truly extraordinary." - Kimberly McCreight, author of "A dazzling debut thriller . . . This is a smart, female-focused inversion of the serial killer thriller perfect for readers who otherwise wouldn't give the genre a second look." - Publishers Weekly (starred review) Kirkus Reviews - Library Journal - Booklist

"Clémence Michallon has managed to reimagine the serial killer novel, delivering all (and frankly, more) of the expected suspense and psychological tension, but offering a story about women-the ones who didn't know the evil that lurked within, the ones who tried to placate or fight but still perished, the ones who might actually survive. Haunting but never prurient,

"Expertly structured and luminously rendered,

"While a widowed man falls for a bartender, the woman he's held hostage for years plots her escape in this fast-paced thriller . . . A twisted premise that raises unexpected moral questions." -

"A brutal, sad, heartbreaking story focused on resilience and survival. Recommended for fans of true crime stories, Gillian Flynn, or Jessica Knoll."
"Nightmarish, nerve-jangling, and horrifying, this one is not for the fainthearted, but it's an explosive, utterly gripping read."

CHAPTER 1

The woman in the shed

You like to think every woman has one, and he just happens to be yours.

It's easier this way. If no one's free. There is no room in your world for the ones still outside. No love for the wind in their hair, no patience for the sun on their skin.

He comes at night. Unlocks the door. Drags his boots through a trail of dead leaves. Shuts the door behind him, slides the deadbolt into place.

This man: young, strong, groomed. You think back to the day you met, to that brief moment before he revealed his true nature, and here's what you see: A man who knows his neighbors. Who always takes out the recycling on time. Who stood in the delivery room the day his child was born, a steady presence against the evils of the world. Mothers see him in line at the grocery store and shove their babies into his arms: Can you hold her for a minute, I forgot the formula, be right back.

And now he's here. Now he's yours.

There is an order to what you do.

He glances at you, a look that serves as an inventory. You are here. All two arms, two legs, one torso, and one head of you.

Then comes the sigh. A softening in the muscles of his back as he settles into your shared moment. He bends to adjust the electric heater or the fan, depending on the season.

You put out your hand and receive a Tupperware box. Steam rises from the lasagna, the shepherd's pie, the tuna casserole, whatever else it might be. The food, piping hot, leaves blisters on the roof of your mouth.

He hands you water. Never in a glass. Always in a canteen. Nothing that can be broken and sharpened. The cold liquid sends electric shocks through your teeth. But you drink, because the time to drink is now. A metallic taste lingers in your mouth afterward.

He gives you the bucket, and you do what you have to do. You stopped feeling ashamed a long time ago.

He takes your waste and leaves you for a minute or so. You hear him right outside, the padding of his boots against the ground, the spray of the hose. When he comes back, the bucket is clean, full of soapy water.

He watches as you clean yourself. In the hierarchy of your body, you are the tenant and he is the landlord. He hands you your tools: a bar of soap, a plastic comb, a toothbrush, a small tube of toothpaste. Once a month, the anti-lice shampoo. Your body: always brewing trouble, and him, keeping it at bay. Every three weeks, he pulls the nail clippers out of his back pocket. He waits while you snip yourself back to presentableness, then takes them back. Always, he takes them back. You have done this for years.

You put your clothes back on. It seems pointless to you, given what follows, but this is what he's decided. It doesn't work, you think, if you do it yourself. He has to be the one to pull down the zippers, undo the buttons, peel off the layers.

The geography of his flesh: things you didn't want to learn, but learned anyway. A mole on his shoulder. The trail of hair down his abdomen. His hands: the grip of his fingers. The hot pressure of his palm on your neck.

Through it all, he never looks at you. This isn't about you. This is about all the women and all the girls. This is about him and all the things boiling inside his head.

When it's over, he never lingers. He's a man in the world, with responsibilities calling out to him. A family, a household to run. Homework to check. Movies to watch. A wife to keep happy and a daughter to cradle. There are items on his to-do list beyond you and your little existence, all demanding to be crossed out.

Except tonight.

Tonight, everything changes.

Tonight is the night you see this man-this very careful man, known to take only calculated steps-violate his own rules.

He pushes himself up, palms flat on the wooden floor. His fingers are miraculously splinter-free. He secures the belt buckle underneath his belly button, pushes the metal against the tight skin of his midsection.

"Listen," he says.

Something sharpens, the most essential part of you rising to attention.

"You've been here long enough."

You search his face. Nothing. He's a man of few words, of muted facial expressions.

"What do you mean?" you ask.

He shrugs his fleece back on, zips it up to his chin.

"I have to move," he says.

Again, you must ask: "What?"

A vein pulses at the base of his forehead. You have annoyed him.

"To a new house."

"Why?"

He frowns. Opens his mouth as if to say something, then thinks better of it.

Not tonight.

You make sure his gaze catches yours on his way out. You want him to drink in your confusion, all the questions left unaddressed. You want him to feel the satisfaction of leaving you hanging.

Rule number one of staying alive in the shed: He always wins. For five years, you have made sure of it.

CHAPTER 2

Emily

I have no idea if Aidan Thomas knows my name. I wouldn't hold a grudge if he didn't. He has more important things to remember than the name of the girl who pours his Cherry Coke twice a week.

Aidan Thomas doesn't drink. Not liquor. A beautiful man who doesn't drink could be a problem for a bartender, but my love language isn't booze; it's people sitting at my bar and putting themselves in my care for an hour or two.

This isn't a language Aidan Thomas speaks fluently. He's a deer on the side of the road, keeping still until you drive by, ready to bolt if you show too much interest. So I let him come to me. Tuesdays and Thursdays. In a sea of regulars, he's the only one I want to see.

Today is a Tuesday.

At seven o'clock, I start glancing at the door. Keep one eye out for him and the other on the kitchen-my lead waitress, my sommelier, my absolute prick of a head chef. My hands move on autopilot. One sidecar, one Sprite, one Jack and Coke. The door opens. It's not him. It's the lady from the four-top by the door who had to go move her car to a new spot. One bitters and soda. A new straw for the kid at the back. A report from my lead waitress: the four-top didn't like the pasta. It was cold or it wasn't spicy enough. Their grievances are unclear, but they are here, and Cora isn't losing her tips because the kitchen can't work a food warmer. Placate Cora. Tell her to tell the cooks to redo the pasta, with a free side of something as an apology. Or have Sophie, our baker, send out a dessert if the four-top look like they have a sweet tooth. Whatever it takes to shut them up.

The restaurant is a black hole of needs, a monster that can never be sated. My father never asked me; he just assumed I would step in. And then he went ahead and died, because that's what chefs do-exist in a blur of heat and chaos only to leave you to pick up the pieces.

I pinch my temples between two fingers, try to fend off the dread. Maybe it's the weather-it's the first week of October, still early fall, but the days are getting shorter, the air colder. Maybe it's something else. But tonight, every failure feels especially mine.

The door opens.

It's him.

Something lightens inside of me. A joy bubbles up, the kind that leaves me feeling small and a little bit dirty and possibly quite dumb, but it's the sweetest sensation the restaurant has to offer, and I'll take it. Twice a week, I'll take it.

Aidan Thomas sits at my bar in silence. He and I don't talk except for the usual pleasantries. This is a dance, and we know our steps by heart. Glass, ice cubes, soda gun, paper coaster. Amandine written in vintage cursive across the cardboard. One Cherry Coke. One satisfied man.

"Thank you."

I give him a quick smile and keep my hands busy. In between tasks-rinsing a shaker, organizing jars of olives and lemon slices-I sneak glances at him. Like a poem I know by heart but never tire of: blue eyes, dark-blond hair, neat beard. Lines under his eyes, because he has lived. Because he has loved and lost. And then, his hands: one resting on the counter, the other wrapped around his glass. Steady. Strong. Hands that tell a story.

"Emily."

Cora's leaning against the bar.

"What now?"

"Nick says we need to eighty-six the sirloin."

I hold in a sigh. Nick's tantrums are not Cora's fault.

"And why would we need to do that?"

"He says the cut isn't right and the cooking times are off."

I tear my eyes away from Aidan to face Cora.

"I'm not saying he's right," she says. "He just . . . asked me to tell you."

At any other time, I would leave the bar and deal with Nick myself. But he's not going to take this moment from me.

"Tell him message received."

Cora waits for the rest. She knows as well as I do that "message received" won't get Nick off anyone's back.

"Tell him that if we get any complaints about the sirloin, I'll handle them personally. I promise. I'll shoulder all the blame. Sirloingate will be my legacy. Tell him the food has been raved about tonight. And tell him he should worry less about the sirloin and more about his pickup station, if his guys are sending out cold food."

Cora raises her hands, like All right, all right. She heads back toward the kitchen.

This time, I allow myself a sigh. I'm about to turn my attention to a couple of martini glasses in need of a shine when I feel a gaze on me.

Aidan.

He's looking up from the counter, giving me a half smile.

"Sirloingate, eh?"

Shit. He heard.

I force myself to chuckle. "Sorry about that."

He shakes his head, takes a sip from his Cherry Coke.

"No need to apologize," he says.

I smile back and focus on my martini glasses, for real this time. In the corner of my eye, Aidan finishes his Coke. Our choreography resumes: A tilt of the head to ask for his check. A hand raised briefly as a goodbye.

And just like that, the best part of my day is over.

I collect Aidan's receipt-two-dollar tip, as always-and his empty cup. It's not until I wipe the bar that I notice it: a hitch, a change in our well-rehearsed pas de deux.

His coaster. The paper one I slipped under his drink. Now would be the time for me to throw it in the recycling bin, but I can't find it.

Maybe it fell? I step on the other side of the counter, look at the foot of the barstool he was sitting on just a few minutes ago. Nothing.

It's the weirdest thing, but undeniable. The coaster is gone.

CHAPTER 3

The woman in the shed

He brought you here.

His home revealed itself to you in flashes, quick glances when he wasn't looking. Over the years, you have gone over those images, clung to every detail: the house at the center of a patch of land. Green grass, willow trees. Every plant trimmed, every leaf tended to. Smaller buildings scattered around the property like tea cakes on a platter. A detached garage, a barn, a bike rack. Power lines snaking through branches. This man lived somewhere soft and beautiful. A place for children to run, for flowers to bloom.

He walked fast, down a dirt path and up a hill. The house faded into the distance, replaced by a litany of trees. He stopped. There was nothing to grab onto, no one to call out to. You stood in front of a shed. Four gray walls, a slanted roof. Windowless. He held the metallic padlock, separated a key from the rest of the bunch.

Inside, he taught you the new rules of the world.

"Your name," he said. He was kneeling, yet still towering above you, hands on each side of your face so that your vision began and ended with his fingers. "Your name is Rachel."

Your name was not Rachel. He knew your real one. He had seen it on your driver's license after taking your wallet.

But he told you your name was Rachel, and it was vital for you to accept this fact. The way he said it, the growl of the r and the definitiveness of the l. Rachel was a blank slate. Rachel didn't have a past or a life to get back to. Rachel could survive in the shed.

"Your name is Rachel," he said, "and no one knows who you are."

You nodded. Not eagerly enough. His hands left your face and grabbed onto your sweater. He pushed you into the wall, arm lodged against your neck, wrist bones embedded into your trachea. There was no air, no oxygen at all.

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Amazon.com: The Quiet Tenant: A novel: 9780593534649: Michallon, Clémence: Books

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P.D. James is considered a similar author to Louise Penny. This article details here life, inspiration, and where to begin reading her works. Her books are considered classics in the crime genre.

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" Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and the dead. It forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being."

P. D. James loved the writers of Golden Age mystery fiction-Christie, Sayers, Marsh, Allingham, Tey-the manor houses, the closed circle of suspects, the patient investigator unearthing long-buried secrets and motivations, the restoration of order to a disordered society. She also knew they had flaws-realism and psychological subtlety sometimes took second place to the mechanics of the plot; police procedures and forensic science were often fanciful; and, especially, those notions of order and disorder simply didn't fit the ambiguities of the post-World War II world:

"Crime writers today know only too well that corruption can lie at the very heart of law, that not all policemen are invariably honest, that murder is a contaminating crime which changes all those who come into touch with it, in fiction as in real life, and that although there may be-indeed must be-a solution at the end of the detective novel and a kind of justice, it can only be the fallible justice of men" ( Time to Be in Earnest, 1999).

It was just that fallibility that most fascinated her. "We none of us know another human being so well that we can be absolutely sure about him," she wrote in Innocent Blood (1980), and she peopled the novels she wrote from 1962 to 2011 with an astonishing array of characters, each one-even the smallest-etched with care as their lives unraveled under the revealing trauma of a murder inquiry. Blending the traditional detective story with the psychological thriller, she explored themes of obsession, revenge, neglect, ambition, morality, greed, deceit, identity, the existence of evil, and the implacable force of the past, all in prose that was at once elegant and graceful, sometimes tinged with dry humor, always filled with remarkable power.

Labeled "the greatest contemporary writer of classic crime," "the best practitioner of the mystery novel writing today," and "a craftsman with a poet's vision," she was often said by critics to have "transcended" the genre. I have never liked that phrase myself. I've always felt that crime fiction has done quite nicely all by itself, thank you very much, with no need to be "transcended." What is true, though, is that James took the detective novel and helped to refine it, deepen it, amplify it. She liked to compare the form of the traditional detective novel with that of the sonnet-no one claimed that the fourteen lines and strict rhyming scheme of the latter constrained it from becoming great poetry; likewise there was nothing in the contours of the detective novel that kept it from becoming great literature.

Wherever it was, James would set the scene before us in prose that was precise, evocative, layered, immediately engaging all the senses:

"It loomed up out of the darkness, a stark shape against a grey sky pierced with a few high stars. And then the moon moved from behind a cloud and the house was revealed; beauty, symmetry and mystery bathed in white light" ("The Mistletoe Murder," The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories, 2016)

" The window was slightly open at the bottom. He pushed it open, wincing at the rasp of the wood, and put out his head. The rich, loamy smell of the fen autumn night washed over his face, strong, yet fresh. The rain had stopped and the sky was a tumult of gray clouds through which the moon, now almost full, reeled like a pale, demented ghost. His mind stretched out over the deserted fields and the desolate dikes to the wide, moon-bleached sands of the Wash and the creeping fringes of the North Sea. He could fancy that he smelled its medicinal tang in the rain-washed air. Somewhere out there in the darkness, surrounded by all the paraphernalia of violent death, was a body" (Death of an Expert Witness).

" The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-aged man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life. The hand-made shoes still gleamed except for some scruffing of the toe caps, the silk tie was knotted under the prominent Adam's apple. He had dressed with careful orthodoxy for the town, this hapless voyager; not for this lonely sea; nor for his death.

"It was early afternoon in mid-October and the glazed eyes were turned upwards to a sky of surprising blue across which the light south-west wind was dragging a few torn rags of cloud. The wooden shell, without mast or row locks, bounced gently on the surge of the North Sea so that the head shifted and rolled as if in restless sleep. It had been an unremarkable face even in life and death had given it nothing but a pitiful vacuity. The fair hair grew sparsely from a high bumpy forehead, the nose was so narrow that the white ridge of bone looks as if it were about to pierce the flesh; the mouth, small and thin-lipped, had dropped open to reveal two prominent front teeth which gave the whole face the supercilious look of a dead hare" (Unnatural Causes, 1967).

James devoted the same attention to her characters. It made no difference how crucial or incidental they were, each one told a story.

However, James was at her best when she allowed herself to stretch out:

" She was a thin, brown-skinned woman, brittle and nobbly as a dead branch who looked as if the sap had long since dried in her bones. She gave the appearance of having gradually shrunk in her clothes without having noticed it. Her working overall of thick fawn cotton hung in long creases from her narrow shoulders to mid-calf and was bunched around her waist by a schoolboy's belt of red and blue stripes clasped with a snake buckle. Her stockings were a concertina around her ankles, and either she preferred to wear shoes at least two sizes too large, or her feet were curiously disproportionate to the rest of her body. She had appeared as soon as summoned, had plonked herself down opposite Dalgliesh, her immense feet planted firmly astride, and had eyed him with anticipatory malevolence as if about to interview a particularly recalcitrant housemaid " (Shroud for a Nightingale).

" For Venetia the change from the long-established provincial single-sex high school, with its slightly snobbish conventions and local traditions, was less traumatic than she had expected. It was as easy to be a loner at the new school as it had been at the old. She coped with the few bullies by a tongue which could lash them into silence; there was, after all, more than one way of making oneself feared. She worked hard in school, harder still at home. She knew precisely where she wanted to go. The three top-grade A levels gained her an Oxford place. The first-class degree was followed by an equally brilliant academic success in her Bar examinations. By the time she went up to Oxford she thought she knew all she needed to know about men. The strong could be devils; the weak were moral cowards. There might be men she would sexually desire, even admire, come to like and even want to marry. But never again would she put herself at the mercy of a man " (A Certain Justice).

"As Graham Greene once wrote," James said, "I have a splinter of ice in my heart. If I had a friend in distress, I would have no hesitation in putting my arms around her to comfort her, but part of me would be observing the scene."

James' most important character was, of course, Adam Dalgliesh, one of the most iconic figures in crime fiction. The only child of an elderly couple, the son of a vicar, he lost a wife and baby son early on, and since then has led a very private life. He is also a respected poet, a fact that mystifies many onlookers who can't quite square one man being both a poet and a policeman. Dalgliesh also worries about it himself sometimes: "People tell me things. It had begun when he was a young detective-sergeant and then it had surprised and intrigued him, feeding his poetry, bringing the half-shameful realization that for a detective it would be a useful gift. The pity was there. He had known from childhood the heartbreak of life and that, too, had fed the poetry. He thought, I have taken peoples' confidences and used them to fasten gyves round their wrists" ( The Murder Room).

James always said that she gave Dalgliesh the qualities she most admired in either men or women-"compassion without sentimentality, generosity, courage, intelligence, and independence" ( A Certain Justice)-but some of those qualities can cut both ways. His detachment is both his strength and his weakness: "How long could you stay detached, he wondered, before you lost your own soul" ( A Mind to Murder, 1963). His independence and lack of sentimentality make him prone to personal antipathies and occasional sudden anger, and his "cold sarcasm could be more devastating than another officer's bawled obscenities" ( Devices and Desires).

However, he is a listener, be they witnesses, suspects, or his own team members. "This quiet, gentle, deep-voiced man," thinks one interviewee, "hadn't bothered to commiserate with her on the shock of finding the body. He hadn't smiled at her. He hadn't been paternal or understanding. He gave the impression that he was interested only in finding out the truth as quickly as possible and that he expected everyone else to feel the same. She thought that it would be difficult to tell him a lie" ( A Mind to Murder).

James always said that she gave Dalgliesh the qualities she most admired in either men or women-"compassion without sentimentality, generosity, courage, intelligence, and independence."

These qualities, though, can also strike terror in his subordinates. When he invites them to talk with him about what they had seen and heard, it meant that he "now expected to hear a brief, succinct, accurate, elegantly-phrased but comprehensive account of the crime which would give all the salient facts so far known to someone who came to it freshly. This ability to know what you want to say and to say it in the minimum of appropriate words is as uncommon in policemen as in other members of the community. Dalgliesh's subordinates were apt to complain that they hadn't realized a degree in English was the new qualification for joining the C.I.D." ( Shroud for a Nightingale).

The result is a clearance rate that over the course of the series takes him from Detective Chief-Inspector to Superintendent to Commander, with his own special squad that investigates crimes of particular social or political sensitivity, as well as a role as special adviser to the Commissioner. Naturally, this does not always sit well with some others. "The Yard's wonder boy," grouses one in Death of an Expert Witness; "the Commissioner's blue-eyed boy," sniffs another in The Skull Beneath the Skin (1982), continuing, "When the Met, or the Home Office, come to that, want to show that the police know how to hold their forks or what bottle to order with the canard a l'orange and how to talk to a Minister on terms level with his Permanent Secretary, they wheel out Dalgliesh."

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The worst of those four? In Death of an Expert Witness, Dalgliesh tells his sergeant what else that old chief told him: "He said: 'They'll tell you that the most destructive force in the world is hate. Don't you believe it, lad. It's love. And if you want to make a detective, you'd better learn to recognize it when you meet it.'"

Dalgliesh knows what he's talking about there, too. He's had many affairs, so he can certainly recognize love, but he keeps it out at arm's length. He loved his wife and son, they died, and he's never going to let anything like that destroy him again:

" His grief for his dead wife, so genuine, so heartbreaking at the time-how conveniently personal tragedy had excused him from further emotional involvement. His love affairs, like the one which at present spasmodically occupied a little of his time and somewhat more of his energy, had been detached, civilized, agreeable, undemanding. It was understood that his time was never completely his own but that his heart most certainly was. The women were liberated. They had interesting jobs, agreeable flats, they were adept at settling for what they could get. Certainly they were liberated from the messy, clogging, disruptive emotions which embroiled other female lives. What, he wondered, had those carefully spaced encounters, both participants groomed for pleasure like a couple of sleek cats, to do with love....And the worst of it-or perhaps the best - was that he couldn't now change even if he wanted and that none of it mattered." (The Black Tower)

Eventually, it does matter-but it takes him a long time to get there, and it is one of the most intriguing aspects of his evolution throughout the entire series.

Any discussion of Dalgliesh's love life has to begin with Cordelia Gray, whose introduction in 1972's stand-alone An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and then its 1982 sequel The Skull Beneath the Skin broke ground for any current woman professional P.I. you'd care to name. Gray is slight, smart, all of twenty-two years old, and desperately in need of a job when when she joins a scruffy, one-man detective agency run by Bernie Pryde, a former Met policeman and a fount of stories about, and adages by, his former Superintendent, Adam Dalgliesh. Gray's mother died in childbirth and her father early on decamped to the Continent to become "an itinerant Marxist poet and an amateur revolutionary," leaving Cordelia to a succession of foster homes and then, by a lucky break, a convent education-she was "muddled" with another C. Gray who was a Roman Catholic-where she did so well she was pointed toward Cambridge, until her father found her again and drafted her, at sixteen, "as cook, nurse, messenger, and general camp follower to Daddy and the comrades" ( An Unsuitable Job for a Woman).

Now, here she is, learning the detective trade from Bernie, and by extension, this paragon of a Superintendent, whom, from the stories, she doesn't like at all because it was he who had been responsible for Bernie getting fired from the Met: "She had devised a private litany of disdain: supercilious, superior, sarcastic Super."

And then Bernie goes and kills himself-he was dying of cancer, it seems-and wills her the entire agency, such as it is. Her first big case is a doozy (see Essentials below), and in the last chapter of the book brings her into contact with Dalgliesh himself, who has a great many questionsabout what happened. Cordelia refuses to budge, heeding Bernie's advice, learned (of course) from Dalgliesh, "If you're tempted to crime, stick to your original statement," and he finally lets her go, though not without feeling a bit of a current between them. "I took to her," he tells the Assistant Commissioner, "but I'm glad I shan't be encountering her again. I dislike being made to feel during a perfectly ordinary interrogation that I'm corrupting the young."

Alas, we never see Cordelia Gray in a book of her own again after Skull. There's a reason for it-but we'll deal with that later.

" The world is a beautiful and terrible place. Deeds of horror are committed every minute and in the end those we love die. If the screams of all earth's living creatures were one scream of pain, surely it would shake the stars. But we have love. It may seen a frail defense against the horrors of the world, but we must hold fast and believe in it, for it is all that we have. "

Throughout the series, those screams, those deeds, have been as vivid to us as they have been for Dalgliesh and his team-a rotating cast of sergeants and detective inspectors, each of them brought alive as individuals, and none more so than her other most memorable continuing character, a tough, up-by-the-bootstraps young detective named Kate Miskin, with a scathing class consciousness. After interviewing a smug middle class woman, she fulminates:

"She had spent years and energy putting the past behind her...but had she left something of herself behind?...She become middle class. But when the chips were down, wasn't she still on the side of those almost forgotten neighbors? And wasn't it the Mrs. Faradays, the prosperous, educated, liberal middle class who in the end controlled their lives? She thought, They criticize us for illiberal responses which they never need experience. They don't have to live in a local authorityhigh-block slum with a vandalized lift and constant incipient violence. They don't send their children to schools where the classrooms are battlefields and eighty percent of the children can't speak English. If their kids are delinquent, they get sent to a psychiatrist, not a youth court. If they need urgent medical treatment, they can always go private. No wonder they can afford to be so bloody liberal" (The Murder Room).

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A motherless, illegitimate child from a stinking inner-city high-rise, she knew the police force was her best chance for advancement, a place where her lack of a university degree wouldn't hold her back, but she still has to use every ounce of her intelligence and determination to climb the ladder. For a long time, the Met didn't even have women in the detective force; now: "It was a job where people, when they needed you, demanded that you should be there at once, unquestionably, effectively, and when they didn't, preferred to forget you existed....You kept sane by knowing that hypocrisy might be politically necessary, but that you didn't have to believe it. You kept honest; there was no point in the job otherwise. You did the job so that your male colleagues had to respect you even if it was too much to expect that they would like you. You kept your private life private, unmessy....You knew how far you could reasonably hope to rise and how you proposed to get there. You made no unnecessary enemies; it was hard enough for a woman to climb without getting kicked in the ankles on the way up" ( A Taste for Death).

She does indeed get her fair share of sexism and resentment on the way, but she also gets that "fizz of exhilaration that comes with every new case...this murder with all it promised of excitement, human interest, the challenge of the investigation, the satisfaction of ultimate success" ( A Certain Justice) - although she is forced to think uncomfortably, "Someone had to die before she would feel like this."

She is protesting too much, though. Even in The Private Patient, with Dalgliesh's wedding in the offing and her own further rise in rank assured, she catches a look of fury on Dalgliesh's face at someone's high-handed condescension, and thinks to herself, "Emma had never seen that look. There were still areas of Dalgliesh's life which she, Kate, shared which were closed to the woman he loved, and always would be."

Kate never lets it show, however, because she is a professional, and that is one of the real pleasures of reading P. D. James. Her police men and women are layered, complex human beings, always competent, sometimes inspired, and James plays fair as she takes us with them through the cases. Her murderers are just as psychologically dense, killing because they must, whether it be for one of the four L's or because their secrets and lies have caught up to them, often within the family, often stemming from terrible events or betrayals in the past. The criminal violence she portrays is never casual-though she can write a hair-raising action scene with the best of them-but rooted in moral complexity, with a keen sense of what she once described as "the horror of murder, the tragedy of murder, the harm that murder does."

That is why she is as modern today as she was nearly sixty years ago when she started - but her knowledge was hard-won.

***

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in 1920, the daughter of a tax inspector and granddaughter of a headmaster of a "not very distinguished" boarding school. Her parents were, in her words, "ill-suited." Her mother was warm-hearted but not that bright, and when James was fourteen, was compulsorily admitted to a mental hospital: "The visits were always painful," Her father was severe, unaffectionate, and with "a pathological reluctance to part with money." She and her two siblings were always afraid of him. "It seemed to us, talking quietly together, that our childhood had been lived on a plateau of apprehension with occasional peaks of acute anxiety."

Her best memories of the time came from when she attended the Cambridge High School for Girls, where she had a favorite English teacher named Miss Dalgliesh, but she had to quit school at sixteen, because her father didn't want to pay the school fees-he did not believe in inflicting too much education on girls.

From then on, James had to earn her own way in the world. At the age of seventeen, she passed the Civil Service clerical exam and spent eighteen miserable months with the Inland Revenue, then became an assistant stage manager for a Cambridge theatre group, where she met her future husband, Ernest Connor White, whom she married at the age of twenty. An army doctor, he shipped out when the war came, while she scraped by handing out ration books and serving as a Red Cross nurse until he returned, which, unfortunately, was not a happy occasion. He had become mentally ill, a schizophrenic, and he would spend the rest of his life in and out of psychiatric hospitals, sometimes violently so, until his death in 1964 from a combination of pills and alcohol-a suicide, James reckoned.

She quickly realized that it was now entirely up to her to provide for herself and her two daughters, and she began to go to evening classes in hospital administration. Her diploma in hand, she started with clerical jobs in 1949, and for the next nineteen years, rose through the ranks, gathering more and more responsibility on regional hospital boards-including the administration of psychiatric outpatients.

After Connor's death, she saw an ad to apply to the Home Office, and from 1968 to 1979, she rose there, too, working intensively with the criminal and police departments, including their law departments, the forensic science service, and the juvenile courts.

There's nothing like having your own books to provide a bully pulpit.

"I found that if I didn't settle down and write a novel, I'd end up an old lady telling my grandchildren that I had always wanted to be a writer."

It was in the late-1950s that she began seriously to get down to work on a novel. She had two teenaged daughters, a mentally ill husband, and a busy job as a hospital administrator, but "I found that if I didn't settle down and write a novel, I'd end up an old lady telling my grandchildren that I had always wanted to be a writer." It took her three years to finish Cover Her Face, writing in the early mornings, planning the book on the Tube to work. She put the name P. D. James on the manuscript only because after trying various formulations-Phyllis James, Phyllis D. James, P. D. James-she decided the last one would look best on a book spine.

She had no illusions about making any money on it-she just wanted to get it down on paper. But then she had a lucky break. On a weekend in Kent, she met an actor who'd written books about the theatre, and he suggested she send the manuscript to his agent, Elaine Greene. The day Greene finished reading it, she happened to be sitting at dinner next to one of the directors of Faber & Faber, who was lamenting the recent death of one his crime-writing stalwarts, Cyril Hare. Well, Greene said, maybe I can help you. He read it, bought it, and James stayed with Faber & Faber for the rest of her career.

She still wasn't making a lot of money, and certainly had no intention of quitting her day job. When she got close to retirement age, however, she decided to leave the Home Office at the end of 1979, "six months before my retirement date, and had carefully calculated that I would be able to live in reasonable comfort until I received my lump sum and pension in August 1980."

It was in 1980 that she published her eighth book, the stand-alone Innocent Blood. It was modestly successful in Britain-and exploded to #1 in the United States: "At the beginning of the week, I was relatively poor, and at the end of the week, I wasn't." She was sixty years old, and never looked back.

Her last novel was published in 2011, at the age of ninety-one, and she died in 2014. She received the CWA's Silver Dagger three times and was awarded their lifetime achievement award in 1987. She was an Edgar Award finalist three times and was made their Grand Master in 1999. She served as president of Britain's Society of Authors, a governor of the BBC, a board member of the British Council, a Fellow of both the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal Society of the Arts, and a local magistrate. She received a dozen prestigious honorary doctorates and fellowships, and delighted in speaking at book festivals, interviews, panels, and presentations whenever she could make the time.

In 1983, she received the O.B.E., the Order of the British Empire.

In 1991, she was made a life peer-Baroness James of Holland Park.

But she wore it all lightly-the awards, honors, peerage. She never played the Grand Lady. In 1986, the New York Times published a profile, and here is one of the most telling parts: "If one were creating a character sketch of Phyllis Dorothy James purely from a reading of her books, it would be of a cool, collected figure, friendly enough but probably difficult to know and talk to. But that is not the person who opens the door when you go up the steps and ring the bell of her house. She smiles, arms outstretched in greeting, and says, 'How lovely to see you, dear.' Fellow crime writers, asked for a word or phrase to describe her, said 'hospitable,' 'unpretentious,' 'marvelously extrovert,' 'wonderfully friendly,' all of which are on the mark. Yet they do not convey her utter lack of affectation and pretension, or the way she radiates good nature and pleasure in whatever she is doing."

Or, as Ruth Rendell said in one of the many pieces published after James' death, "She will always live through her books. But for me, she will also be remembered for being such a nice woman."

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The Essential James

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With any prolific author, readers are likely to have their own particular favorites, which may not be the same as anyone else's. Your list is likely to be just as good as min-but here are the ones I recommend.
A Taste for Death (1986)
"If he had indeed been murdered, then the secrets would be told; through his dead body, through the intimate detritus of his life, through the mouths, truthful, treacherous, faltering, reluctant, of his family, his enemies, his friends. Murder was the first destroyer of privacy as it was of so much else."

The death that Adam Dalgliesh and his new hire, Kate Miskin, are about to investigate is actually two deaths. In the vestry of the magnificent St. Matthew's Church, its "quiet air tinctured with the scent of incense, candles, and the more solidly Anglican smell of musty prayer books, metal polish, and flowers," two bodies lie sprawled, their throats both cut, but they could not be more different. One is that of a Baronet and Minister of the Crown. The other is an alcoholic derelict. What could possibly connect these two men? By the Baronet's hand is a bloody open razor. Is it a murder-suicide? Or just meant to look that way?

Dalgliesh had known the Minister, and liked him, but he is about to knowa great deal more, not only about him, but about his family, his colleagues, and the dark secrets that have filled his life in the past and led him to this place at this time with this companion in death.

For Dalgliesh, it is a case filled with sorrow, but for Miskin, it is something else, a chance to prove herself: "If this goes all right, if we get him, whoever it is, and we will, then I'm on my way. I'm really on my way." After she conducts a successful interview with an overbearing witness, however, she is jolted by a question from Dalgliesh: "Did you enjoy yourself, Inspector?" She replies honestly, because she knows she has no option, "Yes, sir. I liked the sense of being in control....Was the question meant as a criticism, sir?" "No. No one joins the police without getting some enjoyment out of exercising power. No one joins the murder squad who hasn't a taste for death. The danger begins when the pleasure becomes an end in itself."

It isn't the first lesson she's learned from him, and it'll be far from the last. For every reason imaginable-the characters, the settings, the prose, the deep dive into the twisted complexities of human psychology (and a truly spectacular ending!)-this is one of James' best books.
Original Sin (1994)
"There hung over the whole of Innocence House an atmosphere of unease, almost foreboding....Sometimes at the end of the day, when the light began to fade and the river outside was a black tide, when footsteps echoed eerily on the marble of the hall, she would be reminded of the hours before a thunderstorm: the deepening darkness, the heaviness and sharp metallic smell of the air, the knowledge that nothing could break the tension but the first crash of thunder and a violent tearing of skies."

The quote comes from Mandy Price, a young woman temping at Peverell Press, Britain's oldest publisher, headquartered in a beautiful Georgian building on the Thames. Innocence House already has a blood-stained history-according to legend, the builder's wife threw herself from the balcony and her ghost still walks the courtyard-but soon enough Mandy's premonitions come only too true.

First, it's just malicious pranks (proofs tampered with, illustrations gone missing), then a just-fired senior editor takes a bottle of pills, and then the real carnage begins. The managing director, Gerard Etienne, is found gassed to death in the archives room, with the office mascot, a stuffed snake, jammed in his mouth. Who wanted him dead? As it turns out, any of the firm's partners, most of the staff, several authors, and a family member or two. Etienne was planning to upend everything-sell the building, reduce the staff, trim the list-and he was very blunt about it. He was going to get his way, whether anybody else liked it or not.

It turned out, the answer was not.

As Dalgliesh and his team go about their work, however, they discover that even more is going on than all that. These crimes descend from the original sins of the fathers-old outrages, old betrayals, old atrocities, tragedies both public and private. "If God is eternal, then His justice is eternal," an Anglican nun tells Dalgliesh. "And so is his injustice."

This is not only an excellent mystery, with James' usual gallery of complex characters and emotions as deep as the Thames, but it also gives her a fine opportunity to cast a satirical eye on the publishing industry she knows so well. Witness, for instance, this one small sampling, when Mandy spends a couple of days in the publicity department:

"She was introduced by Maggie FitzGerald [the publicity director's] assistant, to the foibles of authors, those unpredictable and oversensitive creatures on whom, as Maggie reluctantly conceded, the fortunes of Peverell Press ultimately depended. There were the frighteners, who were best left to Miss Claudia to cope with; the timid and insecure, who needed constant reassurance before they could utter even one word on a BBC chat-show and for whom the prospect of a literary luncheon induced a mixture of inarticulate terror and indigestion. Equally hard to handle were the aggressively overconfident, who, if not restrained, would break free of their minder and leap into any convenient shop with offers to sign their books, thus reducing the carefully worked-out publicity schedule to chaos. But the worst, Maggie confided, were the conceited, usually those whose books sold the least well, but who demanded first-class fares, five-star hotels, a limousine and a senior member of staff to escort them, and who wrote furious letters of complaint if their signings didn't attract a queue round the block."
An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972)
"You can hardly keep the Agency going on your own. It's not a suitable job for a woman."

People keep telling Cordelia Gray that, after Bernie Pryde dies and leaves her his detective agency, but growing up in foster homes and then playing nursemaid to her father's ragtag bunch of pseudo-revolutionaries has given her a strong streak of independence and an instinct for survival. She is tough-minded but sensitive, thinks quickly, reacts even more quickly, and is a realist to her core. She also knows how to lie-in her foster homes, "she had quickly learned that to show unhappiness was to risk the loss of love. Compared to this early discipline of concealment, all subsequent deceits had been easy." She also has a good memory for the policing knowledge of Adam Dalgliesh, as plentifully quoted to her by her recently deceased boss, Bernie: "Never theorize in advance of your facts;" "Ask yourself what you saw, not what you expected to see or what you hoped to see, but what you saw;" "Get to know the dead person. Nothing about him is too trivial, too unimportant. Dead men can talk. They can lead you directly to their murderers."

All of this comes in very handy when she is offered her first case. A young man named Mark Callender has been found dead in his cottage in Cambridge, hanging by his neck, a lipstick stain on his mouth, the picture of a nude girl nearby. The verdict at the inquest was that he took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed, but his father rejects that completely. "He was a rational person. He had a reason for his actions. I want to know what it was. If I am in some way responsible, I prefer to know. If anyone else is responsible, I want to know that, too."

When Cordelia starts digging, she has to agree that something is off. The cottage is still as the young man left it, with an untouched dinner on the stove, an unfinished row in the garden, gardening shoes dropped casually by the back door. If dead men could indeed talk, this one wasn't saying to her, "And then I killed myself." The police want her not to meddle. His friends want her to leave it alone. His father seems to be hiding something. His father's assistant is definitely hiding something. Standing in the middle of that room, she senses a presence: "Something here had been stronger than wickedness, ruthlessness, cruelty, or expedience. Evil."

It isn't until she is attacked and left for dead that she realizes just how evil.

This is a fine story, told with grace and style, and it makes you immediately want to pick up the second Cordelia Gray novel, The Skull Beneath the Skin. And so you should.
Innocent Blood (1980)
"Someone had watered the flowers overenthusiastically. A milky bead lay like a pearl between two yellow petals and there was a splash on the table top. But the imitation mahogany wouldn't be stained; it wasn't really wood. The roses gave forth a damp sweetness, but they weren't really fresh. In these easy chairs, no visitor had ever sat at ease."

The observer is Philippa Palfrey, and the details above are a sign of what is to come. Adopted as a child by a prosperous, emotionally distant couple, newly turned eighteen, she has come to a government office to find who her birth parents were, though she has already concocted her own elaborate story: her father was an aristocrat, her mother a parlor maid, so of course she had to be put out for adoption! The truth is much more terrifying.

"We all need our fantasies in order to live," warns the social worker. "Sometimes relinquishing them can be extraordinarily painful, not a rebirth into something exciting and new, but a kind of death." And so it proves to be. Philippa's parents were murderers. Her father raped a twelve-year-old girl, and her mother, Mary Ducton, strangled her. The former died in prison; the latter is about to get released.

Innocent Blood is about how everyone deals with this information, and what happens next: the adoptive parents scolding her ("You don't really care what your mother did to that girl. It doesn't touch you. Nothing does."); the daughter rebelling and renting a London flat for her and Mary to get to know one another, the mother wary ("You aren't a romantic, are you? You haven't come here with the idea of proving me innocent? You haven't been reading too many crime novels?"); the murdered girl's father meticulously planning to track down Mary Ducton and kill her (as his wife lies dying from cancer, she murmurs, "Better use a knife. It's more certain. You won't forget?" "No, I won't forget.").

Each of them has a fantasy, each of them is about to undergo a series of shocks, each of them will find themselves in an unimaginable situation as their worlds turn upside down. As we follow their day-to-day lives, their paths coming closer, intertwining and exploding in different ways, the tension ratchets up and the air of foreboding takes your breath away.

"None of us can bear too much reality," Philippa's adoptive father warns her. "No one. We all create for ourselves a world in which it's tolerable for us to live."

And when that world shatters? Anything can happen-and does. This is James' masterwork, an astonishing combination of riveting plot, characters, and prose that you will come back to again and again. No wonder this is the book that catapulted her to fame.

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Book Bonus: Fiction

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Besides Innocent Blood, P. D. James wrote two other stand-alone novels, of vastly different natures.

"Early this morning, 1 January 2021, three minutes after midnight, the last human being to be born on earth was killed in a pub brawl in a suburb of Buenos Aires, aged twenty-five years, two months, and twelve days."That is the opening line of The Children of Men (1992), a dystopian novel which envisions a world in which the entire human race has become infertile, what that means, and how it affects society. That sounds grim, and it is grim-except for the small band of individuals fighting to save the world. It's not a book for everybody-James said, "It was traumatic to write and I was glad to return to the less depressing ambience of classical detective fiction"-but it's written with all of James' strengths, and the ending is luminous, filled with redemption and hope.

By the way, are you as freaked out by that 2021 date as I am? Just asking.

Pemberley, as Austen fans will recall, is the estate owned by Mr. Darcy, and the book takes place six years after his marriage to Elizabeth Bennet. They have two children, with a third on the way, when her scapegrace sister, Lydia, arrives out of the wind and rain, screaming that her husband, the scoundrel Wickham, is dead in the woods. He isn't, actually, but when the search party finds him, he is next to the bloodied body of his best friend, and drunkenly babbles what sounds like a confession.

Darcy holds Wickham in very low regard, justifiably so, but capable of murder? Something doesn't sit right with him, and he sets out to uncover the truth. It's a wholly charming tale, filled with the spirit of Austen and such epigrams as this one from the always unlikable Lady Catherine de Bourgh, "I have never approved of protracted dying. It is an affectation in the aristocracy; in the lower classes it is merely an excuse for avoiding work."

"It was great fun to write," said James. "It really was."

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Book Bonus: Nonfiction

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Talking About Detective Fiction, published when she was 89, came about because the head of the Bodleian Library in Oxford asked her to write it and "I was relieved that the subject proposal was one of the few on which I felt competent to pontificate." The result is an idiosyncratic but always absorbing look at the history of detective fiction, its future, how it works, and why it all means so much to us. There are some especially able examinations of the Golden Age and the virtues and failings of the "Queens of Crime," Christie, Sayers, Allingham, and Marsh; as well as an all-too-brief foray into the American hard-boiled style. Slim, elegant, and perceptive, it's a book for the mystery fan-and that's you, isn't it?

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Movie and Television Bonus

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Only two movies were ever made from James' books, but the many television series more than made up for it (though one in particular left her with a bad taste in her mouth, as you'll see).

The first movie was a 1982 British version of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, starring Pippa Guard as Cordelia. It didn't make much of a splash, but the Thrilling Detective website calls it offbeat and atmospheric, so I wouldn't mind seeing it some day.

The movie that did make a splash was Children of Men in 2006. Written and directed by Alfonso Cuaron, best known at the time for Y Tu Mama Tambien and a Harry Potter movie, but since, of course an Oscar winner for Gravity and Roma, it starred Clive Owen, Michael Caine, and Julianne Moore, and won excellent reviews. The New York Times said, "It's the kind of glorious bummer that lifts you to the rafters, transporting you with the greatness of its filmmaking." I agree with all of that. It won no Oscar nominations, but was nominated for both the Edgar and the Hugo, and won the USC Scripter Award. James shared credit for all of those, and if you look closely, you'll see James herself in the opening scene, watching the news while holding a dog.

On television, however, almost all of the Dalgliesh novels were made and shown in Britain, and in the U.S. on PBS's Mystery! series. Roy Marsden starred in ten of them from 1983's Death of an Expert Witness through 1998's A Certain Justice, and Martin Shaw starred in 2003 and 2004 in Death in Holy Orders and The Murder Room. These dramatizations started out at six episodes, but by the time of the two Shaw series, they were down to two. "The difficulty is that television drama has become so expensive," said James. "Everything has to be so cut, so truncated, so changed, that novelists feel that sometimes the essence of a book goes. But I have been luckier than most." She liked Marsden-"he has height, a beautiful, interesting voice, and certainly presence. He is not my idea of Dalgliesh"-citing Marsden's mustache and partial baldness, and some mistakes-"but I would be very surprised if he were. This is Roy Marsden's interpretation of Dalgliesh."

I watched every one of the shows broadcast in the U.S. and loved them all-to a generation of TV watchers, I imagine Marsden is our idea of Dalgliesh.

She had better luck with the three-part adaptation of Death Comes to Pemberley in 2013. Starring Matthew Rhys, Anna Maxwell Martin, and Matthew Goode, among others, it was a stirring and faithful version that pleased James and Austen fans alike.

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Meta Writer and Publisher Bonus

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"Tricky, that's what writers are. You have to keep on telling them how wonderful they are or they go to pieces."

- Original Sin

"What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh.

"Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity, or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity."

"A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously.

"Now, Adam, that's naughty. Coming from a writer, it's treason. You know perfectly well that our people are as hard-working, agreeable and talented a bunch as you'll find outside any mental hospital."

- Unnatural Causes

Old Sir Hubert Illingworth had made his brief appearance in the course of [the party], had shaken Dalgliesh sadly by the hand, and had shuffled off muttering under his breath as if deploring that yet another writer on the firm's list was exposing himself and his publisher to the doubtful gratification of success. To him all writers were precocious children; creatures to be tolerated and encouraged but not overexcited in case they cried before bedtime.

- A Mind to Murder

The new management promoted their poets vigorously, perhaps seeing the poetry list as a valuable balance to the vulgarity and soft pornography of their best-selling novelists, whom they packaged with immense care and some distinction, as if the elegance of the jacket and the quality of the print could elevate highly commercial banality into literature. Bill Costello, appointed the previous year as Publicity Director, didn't see why Faber & Faber should have a monopoly when it came to the imaginative publicizing of poetry, and was successful in promoting the poetry list despite the rumor that he never himself read a line of modern verse.

- Devices and Desires

The guest list had chiefly comprised their most prestigious writers in the main categories, a ploy which had added to the general atmosphere of inadvertence and fractionized unease: the poets had drunk too much and had become lachrymose or amorous as their natures dictated; the novelists had herded together in a corner like recalcitrant dogs commanded not to bite; the academics, ignoring their hosts and fellow guests, had argued volubly among themselves; and the cooks had ostentatiously rejected their half-bitten canapés on the nearest available hard surface with expressions of disgust, pained surprise, or mild, speculative interest.

- Devices and Desires

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Meta Crime Writers Bonus

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The Cadaver Club is a typically English establishment in that its function, though difficult to define with any precision, is perfectly understood by all concerned....The Club is exclusively masculine; women are neither admitted as members nor entertained. Among the members there is a solid core of detective novelists, elected on the prestige of their publishers rather than the size of their sales....The exclusion of women means that some of the best crime writers are unrepresented, but this worries no one; the Committee take the view that their presence would hardly compensate for the expense of putting in a second set of lavatories.

- Unnatural Causes

It was strange how little she knew about a real police investigation despite Bernie's tutelage. It had already struck her that their legal powers were a great deal less extensive than a reading of detective fiction might suggest.

- The Skull Beneath the Skin

It was only in fiction that the people one wanted to interview were sitting ready at or in their office, with time, energy and interest to spare. In real life, they were about their own business and one waited on their convenience.

- An Unsuitable Job for a Woman

Cordelia hadn't known. She had bought the paperback, as had thousands of others, because she had got tired of seeing its dramatic cover confronting her in every bookshop and supermarket and had felt curious to know what it was about, a first novel that could earn a reputed half a million before publication. It was fashionably long and equally fashionably violent, and she remembered that she had indeed, as the blurb promised, found it difficult to put down, without now being able to remember clearly either the plot or the characters.

- The Skull Beneath the Skin

"You should read detective fiction, Adam. Real-life murder today, apart from being commonplace and - forgive me - a little vulgar, is inhibiting of the imagination. Still, moving the body would be a problem. It would need considerable thought. I can see that it might not work."

Ackroyd spoke with regret. Dalgliesh wondered if his next enthusiasm would be writing detective fiction. If so, it was one that should be discouraged.

- The Murder Room

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Meta Golden Age Bonus

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Sipping her whiskey, Blackie reflected that there was something strangely reassuring about Joan's uninhibited interest in and speculation about the crime. Not for nothing was there those five shelves of crime paperbacks in her bedroom, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and the few modern writers whom Joan considered fit to join those Golden Age practitioners in fictional murder....She stared into the leaping flames from which the image of Miss Marple seemed to rise, handbag protectively clutched to her bosom, the gentle wise old eyes gazing into hers, assuring her that there was nothing to be afraid of, that everything would be all right.

- Original Sin

[On the resemblance of a manservant to a certain similarly-named manservant of Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey] Munter's disapproval came over the line as clearly as his carefully controlled irony. He was adept at judging just how far he could safely go, and since his veiled insolence was never directed against his employer, Gorringe was indulgent. A man, particularly a servant, was entitled to his small recalcitrant bolsterings of self-respect. Gorringe had noted early in their relationship how Munter's persona, modeled as it was on Jeeves and his near namesake Bunter, became markedly closer to parody when any of his carefully contrived domestic arrangements was upset. During Clarissa's visits to the castle, he became almost intolerably Bunterish. Relishing his manservant's eccentricities,the contrast between his bizarre appearance and his manner, and totally uncurious about his past, Gorringe now hardly bothered to wonder whether a real Munter existed and, if so, what manner of man he might be.

- The Skull Beneath the Skin

[And then two literary characters in a possible suspect's books strikingly similar to Lord Peter Wimsey himself and his friend and frequent colleague, Detective Inspector Charles Parker] [Inspector] Briggs, who was occasionally called Briggsy by the Honorable Martin in an excess of spurious camaraderie, had a humility...Despite his eminence at the Yard, Briggsy was always happy to play second fiddle to Carruthers, and so far from resenting the Honorable Martin's interference with his cases, made a practice of calling him in when his special expertise was required. Since Carruthers was an expert on wine, women, heraldry, the landed gentry, esoteric poisons, and the finer points of the minor Elizabethan poets, his opinion was frequently invaluable....Inspector Briggs' suspects, if required to make statements - which was seldom - made them in the comfort of their own homes, attended by obsequious policemen and with Carruthers present to ensure, in the nicest possible way, that Inspector Briggs kept his place."

- Unnatural Causes

Kate said, "She found Treeves' body, remember."

"What's that to do with it? The diary note is explicit. She didn't remember that incident from her past when she saw the body, she remembered when Surtees brought her some leeks from his garden. It was then that things came together, the present and the past."

Kate said, "Leeks - a leak. Could it be a play on words?"

"For God's sake, Kate, that's pure Agatha Christie!"

- Death in Holy Orders

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P. D. James: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics

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"Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and the dead. It forces us to confront what we are and wh...

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An audiobook voiced by the comedian herself.

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A Chef's Memoir

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Cookbook from rapper and gangster Snoop Dogg.

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Contemporary Literary Fiction set in Canada with mystery elements.

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Title rated 4.05 out of 5 stars, based on 368 ratings (368 ratings)

As Solace opens, we meet a Northern Ontario family in crisis: their rebellious teenage daughter, Rose, has disappeared. Weeks have passed with no word, but still Rose's little sister, Clara, keeps a daily vigil at the living-room window, hoping that Rose will come back. Feisty and fierce, Clara is not only missing Rose; she is also missing her elderly friend and next-door neighbour, Mrs. Orchard, a retired schoolteacher who is away in hospital. While standing at the window, Clara keeps an eye out for Rose and an eye on Mrs. Orchard's house. Then, one afternoon, a strange young man in a strange car pulls into Mrs. Orchard's driveway and proceeds to move into the house as if he owns the place. Which it turns out he does: Mrs. Orchard has died and left it to him. Soon we discover that Clara's beloved Mrs. Orchard has a complicated and tragic past, and the real mystery at the heart of this novel is what happened between her and Liam, the man in the car. Solace is told in three distinct, compelling voices--Clara's, Mrs. Orchard's, and Liam's--cutting back and forth to carefully uncover the layers of grief, remorse, and love that connect families, both the ones we're born into and the ones we choose, and steadily building towards an assured, heart-wrenching and (despite its losses) uplifting ending.

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A Town Called Solace - Vancouver Public Library

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A Town Called Solace - Lawson, Mary, 1946- - As Solace opens, we meet a Northern Ontario family in crisis: their rebellious teenage daughter, Rose, has disappeared. Weeks have passed with no word, but still Rose's little sister, Clara, keeps a daily vigil at the living-room window, hoping that Rose will come back.

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Learwife has elements of Downton Abbey, references to Shakespearian classics, and is a historical fiction.

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"I am the queen of two crowns, banished 15 years, the famed and gilded woman, bad-luck baleful girl, mother of three small animals, now gone. I am 55 years old. I am Lear's wife. I am here."

Word has come. Care-bent King Lear is dead, driven mad and betrayed. His three daughters too, broken in battle. But someone has survived: Lear's queen, exiled to a nunnery years ago, written out of history, her name forgotten. Now she can tell her story.

Though her grief and rage may threaten to crack the earth open, she knows she must seek answers. Why was she sent away in shame and disgrace? What has happened to Kent, her oldest friend and ally? And what will become of her now, in this place of women? To find peace, she must reckon with her past and make a terrible choice - one upon which her destiny, and that of the entire abbey, rests.

Giving unforgettable voice to a woman whose absence has been a tantalizing mystery, Learwife is a breathtaking novel of loss and renewal about how history bleeds into the present.

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Amazon.com: Learwife: A Novel (Audible Audio Edition): J.R. Thorp, Juliet Stevenson, Dreamscape Media, LLC: Books

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A baking-themed murder mystery game!

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Host your own Bake Off themed murder mystery game night inspired from The Great British Bake Off TV show! Perfect for family, friends or colleagues over Zoom. Get your kit now and have fun!

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A crime puzzle!

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The perfect interactive book for murder mystery fans! Turn the sumptuously illustrated pages to play detective and solve a series of absorbing, challenging puzzles. is a gorgeous and witty book that invites readers to solve 20 puzzling murder mysteries. Cast as the faithful sidekick to amateur sleuth Medea Thorne, you will meet a cast of colorful characters, from ghost hunter extraordinaire Augustin Artaud to Leonard Fanshawe, a competitor in the Annual Perfect Pickled Foods Festival. Using deductive tactics and eye-spy searching skills, you will sleuth your way to unveiling whodunit in this witty riff on the classic murder mystery book.

A body in the topiary garden, a death at a clairvoyants' convention, and the mysterious accident at the boating lake-prepare for a whirlwind adventure, laced with humor and a dash of the macabre!

A delight for fans of Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Edward Gorey.

MURDER MYSTERY PUZZLE BOOK: Great fun for the armchair sleuth, this clever twist on standard mystery novels brings out everyone's inner detective. The combination of visual and story-based clues making this collection an excellent brain game exercise for adults.

DELIGHTFULLY GOTHIC STYLE: This collection of darkly humorous puzzles features a clever die-cut cover and illustrations in a gorgeous gothic style by artist Stephanie von Reiswitz whose lettering and design work can be found on a range of book jackets, murals, editorial illustrations, and posters.

Perfect for:
Murder Most Puzzling

Mystery buffs, puzzle addicts, and fans of true crime podcasts and TV shows

Fans of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, and the Thursday Murder Club mysteries

Alternative to sudoku and crossword puzzles

Add it to the shelf with books like Cain's Jawbone , Montague Island Mysteries and Other Logic Puzzles , The Gashlycrumb Tinies , and Murder on a Midnight Clear

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Murder Most Puzzling: Twenty Mysterious Cases to Solve

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Amazon.com: Murder Most Puzzling: Twenty Mysterious Cases to Solve: 9781452171609: von Reiswitz, Stephanie: Books