Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Getting Back in the Habit

Unnatural Causes by P.D. James

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The corpse without hands lay in the bottom of a small sailing dinghy drifting just within sight of the Suffolk coast. It was the body of a middle-age man, a dapper little cadaver, its shroud a dark pin-striped suit which fitted the narrow body as elegantly in death as it had in life. Synopsis. In Unnatural Causes, the murder of a local author along the sea coast doesn’t appear to be a murder at all. But a vacationing inspector Adam Dalgliesh is drawn into the […]

Who Does a Dysfunctional Family Better Than the Brits?

Cover Her Face by P. D. James

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The thing I enjoy about P. D. James’ Detective Chief Adam Dalgliesh is that he puts together a fine team.  The crimes are meaty and complex, and half the fun is Dalgleish and his posse holding team meetings to review the bits and pieces everyone has uncovered during the day and steadily working their way to the solution.  Whereupon the group of suspects is convened (and there is always a pool of such to choose from) and Dalgleish lays down the verdict whilst the rest […]

P.D. James (1)

Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James

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“I found the yo-yo the day before Christmas Eve, in the way one does come across these long-forgotten relics of the past, while I was tidying up some of the unexamined papers which clutter my elderly life.” A late collection of stories by PD James in terms of publication, but a mélange of stories covering wide sections of her bibliography. I have read a handful of PD James novels, and I generally enjoy them. Her stories are also good, but I did find myself thinking […]

This Series Is Growing On Me

The Private Patient by P. D. James

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cbr14 series This is the second Adam Dalgleish mystery by James I’ve read now, and I do enjoy the set-up.  Essentially, it’s a closed box mystery, a la Agatha Christie, where you know that the perpetrator is one of a certain set of suspects, and the fun is figuring out who.  The Commander in charge, Dalgleish, has a couple of subordinates as his team, and they are called in only for high profile hush-hush cases.  Nothing happens overnight, for they are dealing with wealthy and […]

Classic book, award-winning movie…BAH.

Children of Men by P.D. James

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I remember very little about the movie except a vague impression of not liking it, so I wasn’t real excited when this came up on my library book club list. I was justified in my crankiness; this book was uuuuunpleasant. The story could have been interesting, and the thought-experiment side of things was: how the world’s population would react if there were no more children, how the end of the world can come in with a whimper instead of an apocalyptic bang, how society would […]

“Never say you know the last word about any human heart”

Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales by P.D. James

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CBR Bingo 13 – Libations The version of P.D. James’s Sleep No More: Six Murderous Tales I read has chocolates in tidy rows on the cover. Needless too say, they are used to murderous effect. Years ago, a colleague of mine told me he had met P.D. James at a reading. He said she was very regal and went into detail about how she comported herself. This came to mind as I read Sleep No More. She sounded like a character in one of her […]



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