Death in Holy Orders: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery: 11

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Anyone following my reviews will know that I have serious misgivings about the later James: the first handful of her Dalgleish mysteries were a brisk and enjoyable updating of the GA crime novel, but the later books are bloated and sluggish with a snobby, superior tone and very questionable values: we have insidious anti-Semitism in Original Sin, misogyny and classist attitudes everywhere, and now here she defends the indefensible with her kind old priest who is also a convicted paedophile.

He asked me how well I'd known Ronald, the last time I'd seen him and whether he'd been depressed lately.As an exploration of evil--and as a piece of highly distinctive crime writing--this is James at her non-pareil best. The sea is eating away the sandy cliffs year by year, and sometimes I stand on the edge looking out to sea and can imagine a great tidal wave rearing up, white and glistening, racing towards the shore to crash over the turrets and towers, the church and the cottages, and wash us all away. It was a pleasure to revisit such a powerful work in narrated form; James excels at creating a closed environment where characters are at odds with each other.

As a policeman, he is considerably more plausible than Doyle's Holmes, and that's never stopped us loving the Baker Street sleuth. Er, no, Ms James, this isn't 'hounding' but reporting a crime that the church would rather have covered up. 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.The novel is mainly set in and around an Anglo-Catholic theological college, Saint Anselm's, on the windswept coast of East Anglia. Dalgliesh, James’s master detective who rises from chief inspector in the first novel to chief superintendent and then to commander, is a serious, introspective person, moralistic yet realistic. Here she takes time to create her characters and to lead us into understanding the tensions within this small, isolated community, disrupted from its usual quiet routines by external pressures from the church hierarchy and a group of weekend visitors.