Product Description

Murders present meet murders past in P.D. James’s latest harrowing, thought-provoking thriller.

Commander Adam Dalgliesh is already acquainted with the Dupayne--a museum dedicated to the interwar years, with a room celebrating the most notorious murders of that time--when he is called to investigate the killing of one of the family trustees. He soon discovers that the victim was seeking to close the museum against the wishes of the fellow trustees and the Dupayne's devoted staff.  Everyone, it seems, has something to gain from the crime.  When it becomes clear that the murderer has been inspired by the real-life crimes from the murder room--and is preparing to kill again--Dalgliesh knows that to solve this case he has to get into the mind of a ruthless killer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #60501 in Books
• Published on: 2004-11-09
• Released on: 2004-11-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400076093
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Neither the mystery nor the detective present James's followers with anything truly new in her latest Adam Dalgliesh novel (after 2001's Death in Holy Orders), which opens, like other recent books in the series, with an extended portrayal of an aging institution whose survival is threatened by one person, who rapidly becomes the focus of resentment and hostility. Neville Dupayne, a trustee of the Dupayne Museum, a small, private institution devoted to England between the world wars, plans to veto its continuing operation. After many pages of background on the museum's employees, volunteers and others who would be affected by the trustee's unpopular decision, Neville meets his end in a manner paralleling a notorious historical murder exhibited in the museum's "Murder Room." MI5's interest in one of the people connected with the crime leads to Commander Dalgleish and his team taking on the case. While a romance develops between the commander, who's even more understated than usual, and Emma Lavenham, introduced in Death in Holy Orders, this subplot has minimal impact. A second murder raises the ante, but the whodunit aspect falls short of James's best work. Hopefully, this is an isolated lapse for an author who excels at characterization and basic human psychology.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
After 16 novels, James is still able to find insular communities of professionals in which to set her crimes. This time it's the staff of a quirky museum devoted to England between the wars. The piece de resistance of the museum's collection is the Murder Room, in which are gathered artifacts from famous homicides that took place during the interwar years. Naturally, the room plays a crucial role, both as setting and as backstory, when real-life murder comes to the museum. It starts not in the Murder Room but in a garage, where one member of the family-owned museum is incinerated after being doused with petrol. That the victim was lobbying to sell the museum, over the objections of his sister and brother, only adds fuel to a fire that Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgleish is asked to extinguish. As always, James delves deeply into the psyches of her characters--in this case, the museum's staff--uncovering not just motives and secrets, the stuff of any crime plot, but also the flesh and bone of personality. Her novels follow a formula in terms of the action and the setting, but her people rise above that pattern, their complexity giving muscle and sinew to the bare skeleton of the classical detective story. And none so much as Dalgleish himself, who now must contend with tremors of "precarious joy" as his feelings for Emma, a Cambridge professor he met in Holy Orders (2001), force a life-changing decision. James, at 83, has mastered the trick of repeating herself in ever-fascinating new ways. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
?[A] superbly realized setting. ? The plot unfolds at its Jamesian leisure; the rich, almost posh quality of its slow unveiling allows for sharp sketches of character and place?. [James] ought never to be confused with such practitioners of the murder-in-the-vicarage genre as Agatha Christie. She is subtler, more sophisticated, much more adept at creating character, and her social conservatism gives her a much darker view of human nature.?
?Martin Levin, The Globe and Mail

?[T]he premise is delicious.?
?Telegraph (UK)

?The Murder Room is a brilliantly crafted novel, brimming with detail and rich in suspense; a further testament to James?s skills in both.?
?Waterstone?s Books Quarterly (UK)

?If crime fiction were classical music, P. D. James?s books would be filed under Grand Opera. In a sense, James is the last of the great Golden Age crime writers. She has an instinctive grasp of narrative: despite the leisurely prose, the shocks are beautifully handled. The plot purrs along like a well-designed and well-maintained engine. James writes with rare authority about the civil service, the police and the justice system. She also does an exceptionally good corpse ? she never cheapens the physical appearance of death, but describes it with both respect and clinical attention to detail.?
?The Independent (UK)

?James?s eye for architecture and nature is rare in most genres of the novel now, and this skill for physical description -- along with her psychological acuity.?
?The Guardian (UK)

Praise for Death in Holy Orders, The National Bestseller
?Baroness James of Holland Park has lost none of her power as a storyteller. Death in Holy Orders is a great novel about Heaven, Hell, death and judgment.?
?The Globe and Mail

?James is a delight to read, a writer in love with the language as much as her characters and her detailed plots.? This is an exquisite book, perfect in its details.?
?Winnipeg Free Press

?P. D. James?s latest mystery novel, Death in Holy Orders, reconfirms her place high in the panoply of contemporary crime writers?. This is a book to be savoured.?
?National Post

?This is a grand, gothic novel of gut-wrenching suspense, satisfying at all levels. . . . Here is a novel which goes beyond mere enjoyment.?
?Frances Fyfield


From the Hardcover edition. -- Review

Customer Reviews

Dame James is back!
Any P.D. James is preferable to no P.D. James and while some readers may have found "The Murder Room" faint in some areas, Dame James' latest Adam Dalgleish is, well, Adam Dalgleish. How can a reader go wrong?

Granted, James has given us a new twist (Adam is in love and her traditional police procedural takes a different turn. But before one cries "soap opera," "The Murder Room" is not about Adam Dalgliesh's personal life. It is about a series of murder, a plot outline with which James is quite comfortable and her legions of fans come to expect.

Circumstances surround the undertakings (forgive the pun) of the Dupayne Museum,, a small, rather esoteric, museum devoted to the "interwar years," the period in England from 1919 to 1939. However, the rub is that the lease on the museum is about to expire and the three trustees (siblings) must agree totally on its extension or else the museum cannot continue. One brother, Dr. Neville Dupayne, is dead set (forgive the pun again) against signing; thus the demise of the museum is at hand, it appears. Quickly into the book, the good doctor is found burned alive in very suspicious circumstances and just about everyone has a motive for seeing him dead. Commander Dalgleish and his team from New Scotland Yard are called in and before this death can be solved, two others follow, all with connections to the museum.

James clearly is in charge of this narrative and, as always, controls the pace and the revelations of the investigation. Dalgleish is, as always, superb. The resolution comes not through histrionics or melodrama, but the James/Dalgleish penchant for brilliance.

Is this James' best? Hmmmm. "The best" is probably the individual reader's personal choice, as I've yet to read a "bad" James, or even a "poor" one. "The Murder Room" joins the other dozen or so Dalglieshes comfortably. It is an excellent read. (Billyjhobbs@tyler.net)

Good but not her best book.....
I hate to give any book by P.D.James less than five stars, but as mysteries go THE MURDER ROOM is not one of her better books. She gets four stars from me because even on her worst days James is better than most of her fellow mystery writers.

James strength lies in her character development, and as ususal, in THE MURDER ROOM she has done a wonderful job of getting into the heads of the principle players and sharing their "secrets" with the reader. James also has a great talent for setting the stage and if you like being transported to England via armchair you should know that no one does it better--probably why the dramatized versions of her books are so well done.

However, plot development has never been James strong suit. She often has difficulty linking the murderer's personality with the motive to kill. Her characters seem like ordinary human beings, but sooner or later one of them does something horrendous which seems all out of character and "overkill" for someone who could probably figure out a better way to get on. Maybe that's the nature of murder--stupid.

However, for James, it's almost as though having created a fully rounded character she has difficulty connecting her creation with the act of committing murder. Sometimes she pulls it off, other times not. When she fails, the end is often frenetic and stretches the imagination beyond the breaking point.

I will always read James' tales because I appreciate her philosophical insights acquired over a long life lived in interesting times.

I bought the hardcover version of this book, but I am recommending to friends that they buy a used book (if they don't borrow mine), check the book out of the library, or wait for the soft cover. The price is too steep for the contents within.

When in doubt, return to Dalgleish!
P.D. James doesn't write cutting edge thrillers like she used to (she's in her mid-80s for heaven's sake...even Agatha Christie got tired eventually), but she still has her grip firmly on the heart and mind of the inimitable, desirable Commander Dalgleish. The crimes in question take place relative to the "Murder Room" at an obscure little museum on the outskirts of London. I wasn't transported by the story, which involves murders staged to resemble those in the Murder Room, but I sure did like a chance to be in and around the mind of Dalgleish the Poet once again. I loved dear old Tally, the solitary caretaker, and wished with all my heart that someone would pay attention to her. Alas, this is not a dynamic book, but it is a good, fairly quick read for a nice weekend afternoon. And Lady James sure seems to know a lot about naughty things for a nice old grandmother!