June Books 2) Death in Holy Orders

2) Death in Holy Orders, by P.D. James

This is the first Dalgliesh novel I’ve read – I have a feeling I did once get through An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, so not quite my first P.D. James. (Interestingly, the two books share the theme of the detective being called in to investigate the possible suicide of a young man by his distant, rich, estranged father.) I very much enjoyed it, especially in contrast to Little, Big which I was slogging through at the same time. Of course, the whole thing depends rather a lot on hidden coincidences and secrets (the bit about the consecrated wafer seemed particularly unlikely to me), but it is entertaining and I found the resolution at least psychologically consistent with what we knew of the characters.

The book is set in an obscure High Church Anglican seminary, and there is a certain amount of reflection on the current state of the Church of England – though perhaps it’s more that she is doing a conscious (and at one point completely overt) riff on Trollope.

One thought on “June Books 2) Death in Holy Orders

  1. It’s Russian for “my tweets” (and some of the italic letters look very different from the non-italic versions). I notice that this has been happening to everyone who auto-posts to LJ from Twitter for the last couple of days; presumably our Russian overlords have tweaked the code again. I plan to turn it off anyway as soon as I have worked out how to use Pinboard.

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