A subtle and powerful work of contemporary fiction. Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called on to solve a sensitive...

Collected in this book are four murder mystery short stories by P.D. James, all centered around Christmas and two of which feature the young poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. In the title story, a bestselling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier. In "A Very Commonplace Murder," a "pedantic, respectable, censorious" clerk's secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward...

An evil-tempered forensic scientist is put to death, putting many of his colleagues out of misery. Commander Adam Dalgliesh must exhume the secrets of Dr. Lorrimer's laboratory in order to lay bare the murderous motive hidden in one human heart.

Murders present meet murders past in P.D. James's latest harrowing, thought-provoking thriller. Life imitates art. The redoubtable Commander Adam Dalgliesh is on the trail of a murderer whose MO mimics a museum exhibit. The Dupayne, a small London museum devoted to the interwar years 1919-1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is murdered. Yet even as Dalgliesh investigates this mysterious killing,...

Having used his mastery of disguise and surveillance to nab some of France's most notorious criminals, early nineteenth-century detective Vidocq teams up with obscure medical student Hector to track down the most challenging adversary of his career, a case with ties to the missing son of Marie Antoinette.