Death in Holy Orders

Adam Dalgliesh is summoned to the college of St. Anselm's to investigate the death of the son of a powerful businessman. Having spent the summers of his youth in East Anglia, Dalgliesh agrees to revisit the school only to be met with more murder and mystery. Charles Keating sets a quiet, funereal tone in his reading to impress us with the religious atmosphere of the story. Apart from the dialogue, in which he bestows personality to each character, he maintains the somber tone as a scenic background to the action. Were the first chapter read by a woman, to clarify the position of that character in the novel, the listener would be less bewildered by the subsequent shift in point of view and the novel would offer more color to its audience. J.P. (c) AudioFile 2001, Portland, Maine

Starred review from April 1, 2001
Baroness James may have turned 80, but neither she nor her dogged Scotland Yard detective Commander Adam Dalgliesh (last seen in 1997's A Certain Justice) shows any sign of flagging in this superb whodunit, with its extraordinarily complex and nuanced plot and large cast of credible characters. When the body of a young ordinand, Ronald Treeves, turns up buried in a sandy bank on the Suffolk coast near isolated St. Anselm's, a High Anglican theological college, it's unclear whether his death was an accident, suicide or murder. The mystery deepens a few days later when someone suffocates Margaret Munroe, a retired nurse with a bad heart, because she remembers an event 12 years earlier that could have some bearing on whatever's amiss at St. Anselm's. Enter Dalgliesh at the behest of Ronald's father, Sir Alred, who's received an anonymous note suggesting foul play in his son's death. It isn't long before another death occurs, and this time it's clearly murder: late one night in the chapel, somebody bashes in the head of Archdeacon Crampton, a hard-nosed outsider who wanted to close St. Anselm's. Dalgliesh and his investigative team examine the complicated motives of a host of suspects resident at the college, mostly ordinands and priests, slowly unveiling the connections among the various deaths. Illegitimacy, incest, a secret marriage, a missing cloak and a valuable altar triptych are just some of the ingredients in a case as contrived as any Golden Age classic but presented with such masterful ease and conviction that even the most skeptical readers will suspend disbelief. This is a natural for PBS Mystery adaptation. (Apr. 19) Forecast: With a 300,000-copy first printing, this BOMC main selection is sure to race up the bestseller lists.