The Murder Room - Adam Dalgliesh, Bk 12 Author:P. D. James When Commander Dalgliesh is persuaded by an old friend to visit the Dupayne, a small private museum on the edge of Hampstead Heath, he can have no idea that he will return to it one week later under very different circumstances. One of the family trustees has been horribly murdered and Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a death ... more »which, from the first, is fraught with complications. Even before the murder, the museum was in tumult. A new lease is due to be signed and two of the trustees are determined to keep the museum open, the third passionately determined on its closure. The museum is dedicated to the years 1919-1939 and one of the galleries, the Murder Room, displays exhibits from the most notorious cases of those inter-war years. And now a modern killer is at work, the crimes uncannily echoing the cases on display. All the small group of people, the trustees, staff and volunteers, who work in the Dupayne, have the means and the opportunity for murder. One of them has the ruthlessness to kill and kill again. The investigation is complicated for Dalgliesh by his love for Emma Lavenham, but their relationship, at a sensitive stage for them both, is continually frustrated by the demands of his job. As step by step he moves closer to the murderer, is the investigation taking him further away from commitment to the woman he loves?« less
Once I got into this one, I couldn't stop and was very very late meeting my boyfriend. The best of hers that I've read, absorbing and teasing at the same time.
OurMissBooks - reviewed The Murder Room (Adam Dalgliesh, Bk 12) on
P.D. James is one of my favorite mystery authors and Adam Dalgliesh is an excellent detective. I've never been to England but love stories that take place there, so that's part of the appeal for me. The characters are well drawn and interesting, and the mystery compelling until the end. (I rarely guess whodunnit!) I recommend it.
Another masterful work of psychologial intricacy by P.D. James. Adam Dalglish is in the throes of making a decision about his love life and at the same time is searching for a murderer who has committed two murders in the Dupayne Museum and is destined to kill again.
Very good murder mystery set in and around London in a museum for the years of 1919-1939. The Murder Room refers to murders that happened in London during those years. Very well written.
Neither the mystery nor the detective present James's followers with anything truly new in her latest Adam Dalgliesh novel (after 2001's Death in Holy Orders), which opens, like other recent books in the series, with an extended portrayal of an aging institution whose survival is threatened by one person, who rapidly becomes the focus of resentment and hostility. Neville Dupayne, a trustee of the Dupayne Museum, a small, private institution devoted to England between the world wars, plans to veto its continuing operation. After many pages of background on the museum's employees, volunteers and others who would be affected by the trustee's unpopular decision, Neville meets his end in a manner paralleling a notorious historical murder exhibited in the museum's "Murder Room." MI5's interest in one of the people connected with the crime leads to Commander Dalgleish and his team taking on the case.
A murder mystery set in England. This national bestseller is a "murder she wrote" kind of book involving a museum, a dysfunctional family and a set of wacky museum workers. Two bodies show up early on mimicking historical murders portrayed in the museum's "murder room." A third attempt is made. You will not guess whodunnit.
When someone says 'murder mystery' to me, this is pretty much exactly what I think of. Very much within the classic tropes of the genre, but set in contemporary London, in this book James' police inspector, Dalgliesh, is assigned to investigate a murder that occured on the grounds of a small and obscure museum. The museum was in danger of closing - and the dead man was in favor of that closure, against his siblings' wishes. But did his siblings care strongly enough to kill him? Or was there another person with motivation - someone from the museum's small staff of odd and peculiar characters? Or someone from the deceased's private life as a psychologist?
When someone else turns up dead, things begin to seem more and more complex...
I thought the book was rather long, for its content, but reasonably well-done.
