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The Private Patient (Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries)
by P D James
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Synopses & Reviews 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. Review: "In James's stellar 14th Adam Dalgliesh mystery (after 2006's The Lighthouse), the charismatic police commander knows the case of Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47-year-old journalist murdered soon after undergoing the removal of an old disfiguring scar at a private plastic surgery clinic in Dorset, may be his last; James's readers will fervently hope it isn't. Dalgliesh probes the convoluted tangle of motives and hidden desires that swirl around the clinic, Cheverell Manor, and its grimly fascinating suspects in the death of Gradwyn, herself 'a stalker of minds' driven by her lifelong passion for rooting out the truth people would prefer left unknown and then selling it for money. Beyond the book's central moral concern, James meditates on universal problems like aging ('the amorphous flattening of self') and the government's education policy, which targets 50% of the young as university-bound while ensuring that another 40% are uneducated on leaving secondary school. Against her relentless intellectual view of our dying earth, James pits the love she finally grants Dalgleish — sufficient to reinvigorate hope and faith so rare in both fiction and reality today." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Review: P.D. James' latest murder mystery, the 14th to feature Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of London's Metropolitan Police Service, is not the most formidable example of this iconic author's work, but it's still pretty darn good. Yes, the plot's a little poky in the middle, and yes, it's hard for a contemporary audience to believe that the principal murder victim here, a female muckraking journalist from a modest ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) background, is worth nearly 2 million pounds. Even so, for first-time readers and longstanding admirers alike, "The Private Patient" offers a clear view of the virtues that have distinguished James' crime fiction since her first novel, "Cover Her Face," was published in 1962. Among those virtues are sumptuously imagined settings, both urban and rural; an unflagging effort to animate every character, no matter how minor, with distinctiveness and humanity; and an eagerness to illustrate the monumental changes in English national identity and manners over the course of the 88-year-old author's eventful life. "I could always imagine myself writing a novel which wasn't a detective story," James writes in her engrossing 1999 autobiography, "Time to Be in Earnest," "but I can't imagine myself writing a book which doesn't include death." In many ways, although its plot hovers nervously around a couple of malicious homicides, "The Private Patient" is as concerned with timely death as it is with sudden murder: In addition to fulfilling all the conventions of a traditional mystery, it's also an elegy for lives and for ways of life that are mutating or reaching their natural ends. Among the metamorphoses taking place here is that of a country estate called Cheverell Manor, a grand Tudor pile situated a few hours out of London in moody, beautiful Dorset. (This was the landscape for Thomas Hardy's troubled novels, and to enhance the atmosphere, James adds a creepy prehistoric stone circle just outside the Manor, the site of a notorious witch-burning in the 17th century.) Cheverell Manor is "a house built for certainties," writes James, "for birth, death and rites of passage, by men who knew what they believed and what they were doing." Yet those certainties are gone now, the house having been converted into a fancy private clinic for plastic-surgery patients, and when Dalgliesh first sets eyes on the place, "for a moment in the stillness it seemed to quiver and become as insubstantial as a vision." Dalgliesh himself is undergoing several personal upheavals. He'll soon be marrying his longtime love, Cambridge professor Emma Lavenham, and he's thinking seriously about retiring from police work after a lengthy, much-decorated career. An intensely reserved, impassioned figure (he's probably the only fictional detective who's also a respected poet), Dalgliesh here reveals some candidly valedictory impulses. When he views the strangled corpse of Rhoda Gradwyn, the journalist who meets her death at Cheverell Manor after undergoing surgery to remove a facial scar, Dalgliesh reflects: "This was not the most horrific corpse he had seen in his years as a detective, but now it seemed to hold a career's accumulation of pity, anger and impotence. He thought, Perhaps I've had enough of murder." But murder has surely not had enough of him, or of his two engaging younger colleagues, Detective Inspector Kate Miskin, who's more than half in love with her boss, and Detective Sgt. Francis Benton-Smith, the charming and ambitious Anglo-Indian who has worked with Miskin on a few previous cases. With their usual scrupulousness, following classic Agatha Christie-like "closed-room" protocol, the trio investigates every Manor employee who might have had a reason to kill Gradwyn. Was it her esteemed surgeon? Could it be the doctor's surgical assistant or the assistant's sister, both of whom are about to inherit a substantial fortune? Maybe it was the Manor's resident chef, who dreams of owning his own restaurant, or the strange hired kitchen girl who helps him. And what's lurking in the rusty old freezer in the guest cottage? All the dark secrets spilling out of Cheverell Manor got me thinking about the fascinating English phrase "safe as houses," those reassuring words bred from the same culture that perfected the country-house murder mystery. No one understands better than the English that houses aren't really safe at all, that bombs can assail them from above and that bad ends can come from within. At the same time, there's a nursery comfort in the tidiness of closed-room mysteries, in the calm untangling of clues within their manageable environments. And no one is better than James at maintaining this tension between the cozy and the frightful, the controlled and the uncontrollable — whether her hothouse setting is Cheverell Manor, or the hospital in "Shroud for a Nightingale" (1971), the church in "A Taste for Death" (1986) or the publishing offices in "Original Sin" (1995). Is James, through the valedictory mood of Adam Dalgliesh, signaling her own retirement? "The Private Patient" suggests that there's plenty of death left in the queen of crime. Yet there's also a wistful pleasure in the image of the hardworking novelist and her vigilant detective, the baroness and the commander, walking off toward an unfixed future, hand in hand. Reviewed by Donna Rifkind, who reviews frequently for The Washington Post Book World, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Synopsis: Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a murder at a private nursing home for rich patients being treated by the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell. A welcome addition to the Dalgliesh canon, "The Private Patient" could have been written by no one other than P.D. James.
About the Author P. D. James is the author of nineteen previous books, many of which have been adapted for television in the United States; her novel The Children of Men became an internationally successful film in 2006. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of the Home Office. She has served as a magistrate and as a governor of the BBC. In 2000 she celebrated her eightieth birthday and published her autobiography, A Time to Be in Earnest. The recipient of many prizes and honors, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. She lives in London and Oxford.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9780307270771
- Author:
- James, P D
- Publisher:
- Knopf Publishing Group
- Author:
- James, P.D.
- Subject:
- Mystery & Detective - Traditional British
- Subject:
- Police
- Subject:
- Murder
- Subject:
- Mystery fiction
- Subject:
- Murder -- Investigation.
- Edition Description:
- Hardcover
- Series:
- Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries
- Publication Date:
- November 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 352
- Dimensions:
- 9.46x6.66x1.41 in. 1.40 lbs.
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