Original Sin by P.D. James
Published by Faber and Faber in 1994.
This edition published by Penguin in 1995

The literary world is shaken when a murder takes place at the Peverell Press, a long-established publishing house located in a dramatic mock-Venetian palace on the Thames. The victim is Gerard Etienne, the brilliant new managing director whose ruthless ambition has made him many enemies: a discarded mistress, a rejected and humiliated author, his colleagues and threatened members of the Peverell staff. When he is found dead on the premises, his body bizarrely desecrated, there is no shortage of suspects. Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh and his team are confronted with a puzzle of extraordinary complexity and a killer who is prepared to strike again. With her usual cunning, the author leads us down a multitude of false paths until the murderer and motive are revealed.
This is another of James’s classical British detective stories featuring a central mysterious death and a closed circle of suspects with means, motive and opportunity. James's ability to create a real sense of place, to evoke an atmosphere of suspense and to create characters whose psychology is plausible and gripping makes Original Sin a pleasurable and satisfying read.
Adam Dalgliesh appears in a number of P.D. James’s books.

‘Known for her leisurely paced, thoughtful, and well-characterized novels, P.D. James has risen to the top tier of British mystery writers’
The Barnes and Noble Review

‘An elegantly written, splendidly atmospheric and immensely satisfying mystery’ Sunday Telegraph

‘P.D. James continues to show the younger, more rambunctious crime writers (Hiassen, Dibdin, Ellroy) that there’s still some life left in the classical detective story. …..Perhaps that is the real mark of James’s genius and her enduring popularity in a very unclassical age; she gives us the comfort of the classical detective story, but it comes at a price, a quiet reminder that order - however we crave it – rarely penetrates the human heart.’ Booklist

Phyllis Dorothy James was born in Oxford in 1920. Having left school at 16, she went on to work in the Forensics and Criminal Justice Departments of the Home Office, and has been a magistrate and a governor of the BBC.
Many of James’s novels have been dramatized for television.

By the same author:
Black Tower
A Certain Justice
Children of Men
Cover Her Face
Death in Holy Orders
Death of an Expert Witness
Devices and Desires
Innocent Blood
A Mind to Murder
The Murder Room
The Skull Beneath her Skin
Unnatural Causes
An Unsuitable Job For a Woman

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