The Private Patient (Inspector Adam Dalgliesh Mystery)

Review A classic. ― Financial Times Ranks among the masterpieces of British crime writing. -- Phillip Ziegler ― Spectator Books of the Year The Queen of Crime delivers. ― Los Angeles Times A master storyteller. ― Times Literary Supplement Elegantly phrased, plot-driven, multi-layered and laced with menace. ― Observer Another chance to encounter Commander Adam Dalgleish should always be a cause for celebration. In The Private Patient P.D. James gives her readers a generous helping of murder and musings on revenge, innocence and guilt. ― Independent Product Description Now a major Channel 5 series 'The Queen of Crime.' New York Times When the notorious investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, books into a private clinic in Dorset for the removal of a disfiguring scar, she has every prospect of a successful operation and the beginning of a new life. But won't leave Cheverell Manor alive. Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate the murder, and later a second death, which raises far more complicated problems than merely the question of innocence or guilt . . . 'An exercise in impeccable detection.' New York Times 'James's skill as a yarn-spinner gives plenty of suspense to this intriguing mystery.' Financial Times Book Description A beautiful new edition of The Private Patient, published for the first time in Faber paperbacks. About the Author P. D. James (1920-2014) was born in Oxford and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts and served as a Governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was Chairman of the Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She was an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and The National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature (US). She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors, stepping down from the post in August 2013. Tributes to P.D. James (1920- 2014) From Stephen Page's Tribute to P.D. James , given at the Memorial Service in London on 29th April, 2015 Phyllis had a long writing career of over fifty years that began surprisingly late. She embarked on Cover Her Face in her mid-thirties. In her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest, she admitted some regret that she didn't start earlier, saying that 'a streak of indolence . . . made it more agreeable to contemplate the first book rather than actually write it'. Yes, the well-known indolence of P. D. James! .... Despite a later start she leaves an impressive body of work comprising nineteen brilliant and original novels, and three works of non-fiction, all of which continue to be read throughout the world. To her the choice of detective fiction was simply obvious, but she made it her own and stamped an originality and literary quality upon the genre like no other writer before her. She said that she wrote detective novels for the reasons readers are fascinated by them, for what she called 'the catharsis of carefully controlled terror' and the bringing of order out of disorder. .... The story of her arrival at Faber is well known. At a dinner at All Souls, Elaine Greene, Phyllis's newly acquired agent, sat next to Charles Monteith, a director from Faber. He said that Faber was looking for a new detective-fiction writer since the recent death of Cyril Hare, and Elaine replied, 'I think I have what you are looking for.' Faber took on Cover Her Face