::READERS REVIEWS::

P.D.'s Dalgliesh - I read five of P. D. James' books in this series. It took that long for her protagonist to say inaccurate and truly sickening things about people who use wheelchairs for mobility. She, through Adam, portrays them as whiny, pity-seeking parasites on society. Since I use a wheelchair myself, and am none of these things, I stopped buying her books immediately. She has a right to her opinions. So do I, and I voted with my purse. She is a noted author. and millions of people read her books. Thank you Amazon, for letting me be read.

The Pulp Fiction Philosopher - P.D. James combines wonderful plotting, page turning style and bits of philosophical insights centered around a rock solid protagonist, Adam Dalgliesh. COVER HER FACE is the first book of the Dalgliesh series. It has the strength of an opening book (originality) and also the weaknesses (the style is still being worked out). But, on the whole, very enjoyable.

Cover Her Face - P.D. James is a little wordy, but her Adam Dalgliesh series is excellent. If you like British mysteries this is a good one.

Amazed that there aren't more reviews for this classic - What can I say more than that this PD James novel was the most instrumental novel to keep the spirit of Agatha Christie alive.The debut of Inspector Dagleish is a must-read. And one must remember the Gilbert & Sullivan quote, "A policeman's lot is not a happy one".

Good, but not quite "electric" - I did like the mystery, though I expected to see and hear more from the main character, Inspector Adam Dalgleish. The story flowed (and sometimes bounced) between points of view of most of the people/suspects in the story, as well as Inspector Dagleish. The mystery was intriguing, though the focus seemed to be primarily on the psychology of the house full of suspects instead of on the actual mystery.

Still, I did enjoy the book, and it was a quick read. I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series, and hoping that the main character (Dalgleish) shows up a bit more as we go along.

A very weak debut for a now-famous series - I've been trying for awhile to get into James's corpus of mystery stories, but with only intermittent success. However, having recently finished one of her much later works (_A Certain Justice_, 1997), I decided to go back to the beginning and witness Adam Dalgliesh's fictional birth as a detective. It's been rather an education in the changing styles of police procedurals during my lifetime. The jacket copy compares James favorably to Agatha Christie and Dalgliesh to Poirot -- not a compliment in my own opinion, but it's actually spot-on in this first work. The setting is classic Agatha: the ancient country house, home to an ancient country family, the small village in unfailing feudal support, the drawing room, the church fete in the garden, the cerebral, aristocratic-seeming sleuth accompanied by his faithful sergeant. Even the family's stiff-upper-lip response when Sally Jupp, unwed mother employed as a housemaid, is strangled in her bed behind a locked door, but with an unlocked window. (Doesn't anyone ever have hysterics, as in real life, upon discovering a murdered body?) The girl had just announced that she had received a proposal from the scion of the family, a young doctor (though neither the author nor the character are ever explicit about his emotions that led to such a socially unsuitable impulse), so there was motive enough among the residents of the house. James's style, now well established, is the extended narrative, setting the scene and describing the characters at considerable length, and she's been following that method since the very beginning, it appears. But because she hadn't become so accomplished at it yet, the pace is painfully slow. The book is barely 250 pages but it seems three times that. And it pains me to say that she actually ends it all with the horribly clichéd gathering of suspects in the drawing room where The Detective Explains All.

I have to note, too, that there are chronological problems with the series that are made apparent in this first volume. Dalgliesh has already developed a reputation as a homicide investigator and is already a Detective Chief Inspector, implying that he's at least in his mid-30s (and almost certainly older). And that's in 1962, so he was born in the late 1920s. He even has clear adolescent memories of the war. Therefore, in his most recent outing, in 2010, he would have to be in his mid-to-late 80s. Are we to believe that Scotland Yard doesn't have a mandatory retirement program for its active investigators -- even its stars?