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- A Taste for Death
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- Author: P.D. James
- Reviewer: Sonali T. Sikchi
- Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1986)
- ISBN: 039455583X
- Rating: * * * 1/2 Quills
- www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/039455583X/scriquil
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- This is P.D. James at her suspenseful best.
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- When two bodies are discovered with their throats slit in a London church, Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard is called upon to solve the case. One victim is Sir Paul Berowne, former Minister of the Crown; the other is a tramp accustomed to sleeping on the porch of the church. Berowne's death foments fervent mental gymnastics in men and women across London: Berowne's aged, acerbic mother; his flashily beautiful but unfaithful second wife; his resentful, defiant daughter; his mistress; the three dead women, all involved in one way or another with him; his wife's arrogant lover; his wife's good-for-nothing brother; the family housekeeper; the family chauffer; and other minor characters. Each and every one of these persons perceives Berowne in a manner differing from the rest, with roiling, and sometimes changing, sentiments expressed in unexpected ways.
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- "Murder is the first destroyer of privacy as it is of so much else." And it is for Dalgliesh and for Massingham and Miskin to combine their detecting talents to probe the privacy of all involved, to puzzle out the intricately linked details tying the lives of people across the various strata of society and to ferret out the perpetrator of the double homicide.
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- James achieves so much more than a mere whodunit in this, as in her other books. It is a well-crafted oeuvre with precise prose, rich settings, complex believable characters and a finely-wrought plot with a patina of a wide range of emotions. In delving into what she calls "the fascination of character," James makes each actor in the drama memorable. The characters here read Trollope and Philip Larkin; they are knowledgeable about architecture and art; they have highly developed sensibilities. Apart from the mystery, this novel explores the remnants of the British class system as it crumbles, the old guard represented by Lady Ursula grimly hanging on to the past, and Kate Miskin determined to sweep away all vestiges of her upbringing and create a new life. Yet James's civilized digressions do not detract from the suspense of the plot. She does not employ horrific details for shock effect. Her clue-by-clue description of procedural details, particularly those of forensic medicine, makes readers part of the ongoing investigation.
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- It is uncanny how similar Elizabeth George's novels are to James's -- plots, characters, setting, the way the stories play out and even the choice of words. "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," so the popular cliché goes, but George has really gone two steps further. Her characters have much more depth and complexity. You can picture them in your mind's eye and empathize with them. And no matter which book you pick up, you learn the basic facts and personalities of all her characters (main and minor); and in so clever a fashion, that those readers who have read most of her books are not hit over the head with them (uh-oh, here comes the bio now). Whereas, with James, you have to have read her earlier novels (in the correct sequence) in order to get a full picture of Dalgliesh and the others, and to be able to better enjoy her later books.
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