Innocent House by P. D. James
Feb. 11th, 2011 11:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
quippeThe Blurb On The Back:
P. D. James has been writing extremely popular, highly praised crime novels for more than forty years, and Penguin is proud to publish them in paperback. Her most famous and enduring creation is the poet-detective Adam Dalgleish, and in Innocent House - taken from Original Sin - he is confronted with a suspicious death and a puzzle at a respected publishing house.
This Pocket Penguin consists of the opening chapters from the P. D. James novel, ORIGINAL SIN, and is designed as a taster to read the longer book. As such, you shouldn’t read this expecting to get the whole story – the point is to get you to buy the novel.
19 year old Mandy Price is being interviewed for a position as a personal assistant to Claudia Etienne, a director of Peverell Press – an old and prestigious publishing company that’s facing difficult economic circumstances. While collecting a transcription take she and Claudia stumble upon the body of Sonia Clements, a senior editor who’s committed suicide after being made redundant. The suicide is not the first strange event to hit the company though. When an author receives a malicious letter advising him to pull out of a publishing deal he has with Peverell, Adam Dalgleish is asked by an old friend whether Clements’ suicide could have been suspicious. Although reluctant to get involved, Dalgleish has no choice when the next incident to befall Peverell is a murder ...
Written with James’s usual skill and elegance, the extract has a slow build-up as she sets up the background to Peverell and Mandy Price’s involvement, with Dalgeish himself only appearing towards the end. It’s an interesting opening and it does what Penguin wants in that it encourages the reader to buy the complete novel. However I do not think that it’s worth buying the extract as a try-out when it’s easier to just buy the book in the first place. It’s a nice idea, but having picked this up under the mistaken belief that this was a complete story (which was my mistake) it’s annoying to find you’re just getting a taster.
The Verdict:
This is purely a ‘taster’ book, consisting of the first few chapters for ORIGINAL SIN by P. D. James. As a ‘taster’ it works as it sets up an interesting mystery and brings Adam Dalgleish in to investigate it. However, I’d picked it up thinking that it was a stand-alone short story in its own right, so I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed. I’ll pick up ORIGINAL SIN at some point, but this Pocket Penguin felt like a bit of a swizz.
P. D. James has been writing extremely popular, highly praised crime novels for more than forty years, and Penguin is proud to publish them in paperback. Her most famous and enduring creation is the poet-detective Adam Dalgleish, and in Innocent House - taken from Original Sin - he is confronted with a suspicious death and a puzzle at a respected publishing house.
This Pocket Penguin consists of the opening chapters from the P. D. James novel, ORIGINAL SIN, and is designed as a taster to read the longer book. As such, you shouldn’t read this expecting to get the whole story – the point is to get you to buy the novel.
19 year old Mandy Price is being interviewed for a position as a personal assistant to Claudia Etienne, a director of Peverell Press – an old and prestigious publishing company that’s facing difficult economic circumstances. While collecting a transcription take she and Claudia stumble upon the body of Sonia Clements, a senior editor who’s committed suicide after being made redundant. The suicide is not the first strange event to hit the company though. When an author receives a malicious letter advising him to pull out of a publishing deal he has with Peverell, Adam Dalgleish is asked by an old friend whether Clements’ suicide could have been suspicious. Although reluctant to get involved, Dalgleish has no choice when the next incident to befall Peverell is a murder ...
Written with James’s usual skill and elegance, the extract has a slow build-up as she sets up the background to Peverell and Mandy Price’s involvement, with Dalgeish himself only appearing towards the end. It’s an interesting opening and it does what Penguin wants in that it encourages the reader to buy the complete novel. However I do not think that it’s worth buying the extract as a try-out when it’s easier to just buy the book in the first place. It’s a nice idea, but having picked this up under the mistaken belief that this was a complete story (which was my mistake) it’s annoying to find you’re just getting a taster.
The Verdict:
This is purely a ‘taster’ book, consisting of the first few chapters for ORIGINAL SIN by P. D. James. As a ‘taster’ it works as it sets up an interesting mystery and brings Adam Dalgleish in to investigate it. However, I’d picked it up thinking that it was a stand-alone short story in its own right, so I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed. I’ll pick up ORIGINAL SIN at some point, but this Pocket Penguin felt like a bit of a swizz.
