Another excellent book review

The second review from members of the Friends of the Library. While the Friends are tackling these book reviews with their usual gusto, you don’t have to be a member to submit a book review to the North Coast News. Those interested in submitting a review, but not quite sure how to write one, can use the following as a guideline. She gives a summary of the plot (without giving away too much), uses a well-chosen excerpt to give readers the flavor of the writing, neatly captures the author’s body of work, has some sharply crafted phrases of her own (“seems to be on the other side pressing against the back of the book”) . . . bravo!:

By C. Dingler

In the claustrophobic world of P.D. James’ latest Dalgliesh book, “A Private Patient,” doors are often double-locked. Yet there is no security at the elegant private clinic at Cleverell Manor. 

Murder intrudes, changing everything. Memories of long ago murders cannot be locked out either. The reader follows Police Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his assistants from one door to the next. Within sight of the Manor, a ring of stones stands, closed and secretive. Legend says that a woman was burned there as a witch. Now another woman, an investigative reporter, who has flung open doors to reveal the secrets of others, is herself murdered. 

“A Private Patient” begins with Rhoda Gradwyn standing on the brink of what may be a life-changing plastic surgery to remove a gouged and puckered scar caused by her father thirty years earlier. “She was the only child of a frightened and ineffective mother and a drunken father. … her childhood and adolescence  had been circumscribed by shame and guilt. Her father’s periodic bouts of violence were unpredictable.” 

But life, at least in P.D. James’ books, is unkind enough to deny her what she seeks. Her murder is warned of in the first sentence of the book. Dalgliesh is called in, and with his two detectives, begins a painstaking investigation at the isolated private clinic amid class distinctions, while a suicide and a child’s murder by another child, rise up from the past. 

Dalgliesh, and his Special Investigation Squad of New Scotland Yard, stand on the brink of change.  Dalgliesh to marry, the group to be broken up and each to move from the comfort of routines, where working relations are established and murder, a painful, yet absorbing topic. 

If this is indeed the last book in the Dalgleish series, we will still have a wonderful set of books to read and re-read. P.D. James, 87 in 2008, seems to be on the other side pressing against the back of the book, increasing the tension. Each move the Squad makes, each interview of a potential murderer, each winkling out of a detail, may be the one to end it all – each meeting, the last. Characters are so vividly described, that we may feel as if close acquaintances have moved on, out of reach, no email, and no telephone. Perhaps James will write another tale of Dalgliesh, but if not, each of her long-standing characters faces another door opening, or at least ajar. 

P.D. James, “A Private Patient,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2008 (Available at the Ocean Shores Library

The reviewer is a member of Friends of the Library.