The Lighthouse - Softcover

James, P D

3.85

18,204 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0141044462 ISBN 13: 9780141044460

Publisher: Penguin, 2009

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Commander Adam Dalgliesh returns in The Lighthouse, PD James' number three bestseller.

Combe Island off the Cornish coast offers rest and seclusion to over-stressed professionals who have paid the price of getting to the top. But when one of these distinguished visitors is found hanging from the top of the island's lighthouse, murder - not suicide - is suspected.

Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are immediately called in: the investigation must be swift, discreet, decisive. However, Dalgliesh has his work cut out, since both residents and visitors to Combe Island guard their privacy well - even when murder makes them a suspect. Does the islanders' reticence betray a knowledge of the crime? Another death and Dalgliesh's own life in danger throws the entire investigation into jeopardy . . .

From the author of A Taste for Death and A Certain Justice comes The Lighthouse. PD James' hero Adam Dalgliesh returns for more.

Praise for The Lighthouse:
'It does everything a crime novel should - and then a whole lot more' Daily Mail
'PD James on top form and you will love it' The Spectator

P.D. James is the queen of crime fiction and the author of numerous bestsellers including A Taste for Death, Original Sin, A Certain Justice and Death in Holy Orders. She lives in London.

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Review:

While PD James’ The Lighthouse moves satisfyingly in territory that the author has made very much her own -- the classic English crime mystery -- there are several new elements added, proving that Baroness James is not content to rest on her laurels. While Commander Adam Dalgliesh is once again at work, solving a case of murder in a secluded setting, cut off from the rest of the world (James has long been pleased to introduce variations into the beloved crime situations that exercised her predecessors), and while the structure of the novel presents the reader with the usual strongly drawn cast of suspects and victims, there is a new frankness here, with the treatment of sexuality more upfront than would ever have been countenanced in the era of Dorothy Sayers and co. But long-time readers of this most accomplished of British novelists will also be pleased to learn that the things we turn to James for are all satisfyingly in place.

A secluded island off the Cornish coast, renowned for its history of bloody piracy, has become a retreat for under-pressure men and women in the upper echelons of society. But when one of their number is murdered in a grotesque fashion (his body found on the eponymous lighthouse), Adam Dalgliesh is requested to solve the case, but with maximum discretion. However, it is not a good time for Dalgliesh and his team: he himself is going through a fraught period with the woman in his life, Emma Lavenham, while DI Kate Miskin is struggling with similar upheavals in her life. And their Anglo-Indian associate, Francis Benton-Smith, has his own problems in regard to working with Kate. Nevertheless, the team make progress on the island, until a second savage murder threatens to bring chaos.

It's easy to underestimate James’ achievement with Dalgliesh and co. So often, long-time series characters betray signs of their authors’ growing disinterest, but James has always managed to find new nuances to ensure that we never tire of her cultivated copper. And there's pleasure here in seeing familiar themes orchestrated with such finesse: the difficult, combative figure who alienates a host of people (and thereby set themselves up as a candidate for murder) and, best of all, the cloistered setting -- often a clich� of the genre -- but here, treated with freshness and imagination. --Barry Forshaw

Review:

[The Lighthouse] must stand as one of the last in the line of classic English detective fiction. (Mark Lawson Guardian 2005-10-15)

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