The Lighthouse
P.D. James (Knopf Canada, 2005)

323 p. First reading.
Posted 10 June 2006..


Combe Island is a small, privately owned island off the English coast on which a handful of stone cottages dot the landscape. The island serves as a quiet, rustic holiday spot for wealthy clients in need of peace and refreshment. But when a famous novelist is brutally murdered on the island, poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh is called in to investigate.

P.D. James has been writing Adam Dalgliesh mystery novels for many years now, and it's well known that the quality of her work is well above average for the genre. She's an excellent writer, with a gift for believable, three-dimensional characters and well-crafted story lines. In this novel I found her descriptive writing particularly strong, with vivid evocations of the rugged island coast, the salt spray, and the silence of solitude.

One of the main difficulties, I imagine, of writing a good murder mystery is finding the balance between not giving too much away -- so that the story remains a mystery for as long as possible -- and not giving too little away -- so that the reader does not throw up their hands with a sigh of exasperation at the final unveiling of the murderer. A mystery usually involves a certain amount of calculated misdirection on the author's part, but with the other hand they should be seeding the story with clues to the real identity of the killer. Others may disagree, but I felt that in this book Ms. James was too subtle in her clue dropping. I never would have come to the same conclusion as Inspector Dalgliesh. Indeed, certain points he cites in his case against the murderer seem irrelevant. (Spoiler: for instance, why did the killer hide the phial of blood in his refrigerator?)

P.D. James is now over 85 years old, so there may not be many more Dalgliesh novels in the making. Despite a few minor complaints, I'm glad we have this one.

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