Death in Holy Orders - P. D. James ****
By Brian Clegg
For me, P. D. James’s Dalgleish mysteries are always slightly compromised by the original TV series. With its hauntingly beautiful theme music and Roy Marsden’s sympathetically approachable if intellectual Dalgleish as a model, the original books can feel a little long, and James’s original Dalgleish a little too cold and unapproachable. Having said that, Death in Holy Orders from 2001 is definitely one of her best.
Set in a wild Suffolk seaside location (one that the theme tune seems ideal for), the book takes Dalgleish to a small Victorian theology college, initially to investigate an ordinand’s apparent accidental death on the beach, but soon to be followed by a murder. James is great at sense of place, and gives an impressive feel for the college, its resident priests and the assorted others that are thrown into what amounts to a traditional country house murder in a much more interesting setting.
The book is unnecessarily long at over 500 pages, but I hardly ever felt it was dragging, and there are plenty of peeks at people’s lives. The ending is perhaps the most unsatisfactory part, but is acceptable. A good read for a wet autumnal afternoon. One oddity – it is described in the bookshop text as a locked room mystery. It isn’t.
You can buy Death in Holy Orders from from Amazon.co.uk, Amazon.com and Bookshop.org
The theme is in the clip below – unusually, the original series had no overall title – each book was treated separately:
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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.
Source: http://brianclegg.blogspot.com/2025/09/death-in-holy-orders-p-d-james.html
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