This book is a collection of four short stories that take place around Christmas time. The first story is about an eighteen-year-old young woman who is invited to spend Christmas with her grandmother. She doesn’t know her very well, nor does she know her cousin Paul, with whom she shares these special days. Another unexpected guest is Rowland Maybrick, an antique dealer, who will be found dead in the library. The ending of the story is horrible, but charming. A Very Commonplace Murder is quite morbid. The last two feature James’s inspector, Adam Dalgliesh, in family murders. I had never read P.D. James before and discovered with some embarrassment that she was a woman. I really enjoyed these four short stories. They are intelligently constructed, with little twists and quite funny. I will certainly return to James.
“Dalgliesh was very fond of him and privately thought him one of the few really good men he had known. It was only surprising that the Canon had managed to live to seventy-one in a carnivorous world in which gentleness, humility and unworldliness are hardly conducive to survival, let alone success. But his goodness had in some sense protected him. Faced with such manifest innocence, even those who exploited him, and they were not a few, extended some of the protection and compassion they might show to the slightly subnormal.”
Contents
The Mistletoe Murder (1991) / A Very Commonplace Murder (1968) / The Boxdale Inheritance (1979) / The Twelve Clues of Christmas