Product Description

Headstrong and beautiful, the young housemaid Sally Jupp is put rudely in her place, strangled in her bed behind a bolted door. Coolly brilliant policeman Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard must find her killer among a houseful of suspects, most of whom had very good reason to wish her ill.

Cover Her Face is P. D. James's electric debut novel, an ingeniously plotted mystery that immediately placed her among the masters of suspense.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #19085 in Books
• Published on: 2001-05-01
• Released on: 2001-05-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743219570
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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About the Author
Widely acknowledged as "the greatest contemporary writer of classic crime" (The London Sunday Times), P. D. James has been awarded major prizes for her crime writing in Great Britain, America, Italy, and Scandinavia, and in 1999 she received the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award for long-term achievement.

Customer Reviews

An Impressive Debut That Will Interest Established Fans
Sally Jupp is unexpectedly attractive--and an unwed mother in an era when such still carries considerable stigma. After a sterling record at a home for "fallen women," she finds work as a maid for the aristocratic but somewhat impoverished Maxie family, and once installed shows another aspect of her personality: a perverse pleasure in creating unpleasantness for virtually every one who crosses her path. The Maxie family is largely impervious to her machinations... but when Sally goes so far as to tantalize a proposal of marriage from the Maxie son, her game of troubling the water turns lethal, and Scotland Yard's Inspector Dalgliesh is on the job.

This 1962 effort was P.D. James' first novel, and at the time it drew enough praise to immediately place among the foremost mystery writers of the day. And indeed there is much to be said for it: the story is well-constructed, the characters well drawn, and the crime is appropriately mysterious; on the whole it is a fast and fun read. But not all P.D. James fans will be impressed. Although there is more than a hint of the distinctive style and convolutions James will bring to her later work, it borrows a great deal in construction from Agatha Christie and not a little from Dorothy Sayers in terms of literary style, and Inspector Dalgliesh is not as well developed here as he will eventually become.

On the whole, I recommend the novel--but I recommend it to established fans of P.D. James, who will be interested to see her working in the "classic English murder mystery" style and enjoy comparing this debut work to the author's later and more impressive work. First timers would do better to select one of the many novels that find James at the peak of her form--with DEATH OF AN EXPERT WITNESS or A TASTE FOR DEATH particularly recommended.

Uncover this book!
This is P.D. James' first published book and our first introduction to Inspector Dalgleish. It is easy to see why this book was considered a bold entry into a tough field of really terrific British crime fiction. One of the hallmarks of the writing of P.D. James is her insistence on describing every scene in excruciating detail, but then again, those details enable her to build the story to a conclusion that surprises, but we should have seen all along. This is a fairly unusual story about the murder of an enigmatic housemaid and about the depths of people we assume we know ...and it plays out nicely. Although it was written in 1962, it has a definite timeless quality to it, like so many of the books by P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. For all of their detailed narrative, they never seem to mire you in a period of time unless it is intentional and noteworthy.

A good mystery
P.D. James' first mystery. Of all her books, this is the one that adheres most closely to the conventions of the Golden Age mysteries of the 1920s, complete with an English country house, a locked-room murder, and a final confrontation between all the suspects and the detective (Adam Dalgliesh) at the very end. Such theatrical, Christie-esque devices are certainly entertaining, though this isn't exactly serious literature, which James usually writes. Dalgliesh isn't quite fully developed yet; nor are many of the other characters. Nevertheless, this is a satisfying mystery and a remarkable debut for one of the world's finest authors.