Unnatural Causes

Unnatural Causes by P.D. James
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I remember trying this book out years ago, not long after finishing the Agatha Christie canon. I didn’t get very far. The use of language put me off. This time I bore with it and enjoyed it, despite the lubricity (the slipperiness), the amphigoric (a parody of someone’s writing style), and the armigerous (entitlement to bear a coat of arms). It was written in the 1960s, when some of the elements it touches on—homosexuality in particular—would have been considered forward-thinking if not downright risqué. Now it seems laughably out of touch. Quite how our detective Adam Dalgliesh figures things out is often unclear, and yet at its heart this is a fairly decent whodunnit.

View all my reviews