After a quick detour into science fiction with her last novel, The Children of Men (Knopf, 1993), the venerable James returns to the genre that made her famous. In Original Sin, detective Adam Dalgliesh investigates the bizarre death of a ruthless publisher. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

/*STARRED REVIEW*/ Like a poet committed to sonnets in an age of free verse, P. D. James continues to show the younger, more rambunctious crime writers (Hiaasen, Dibdin, Ellroy) that there's still some life left in the classical detective story. Of course, it helps when the sleuth injecting most of that life is the inimitable, ever-suave Adam Dalgleish, critically acclaimed poet and Scotland Yard commander. Both of Dalgleish's vocations come into play here, at least tangentially, as the murders in question take place at one of London's oldest publishing houses, Peverell Press, located on the banks of the Thames in a Venetian-style mansion called, ironically, Innocent House. A slumping frontlist is the least of the problems at this once-distinguished press: its senior staff is being bumped off faster than a copy editor can blue-pencil a dangling participle. James has created a classic country-house mystery here, with the house transported to the city and the five partners at Peverell Press taking the roles of the landed gentry. One of the surviving four, after the managing director turns up dead, is clearly a killer, and James expertly constructs believable scenarios that might convict any of them. And don't forget the subplot: in this case, the personal crises of Dalgleish's two lieutenant's, Kate Miskin, choosing career over love, and Daniel Aaron, letting his ties to his family and his Jewish heritage slip away. All the pieces of the puzzle are in place, and James plays them with careful attention to the rigors of formula, yet the novel is always more than its form, just as the best sonnets are more than 14 lines of tightly controlled rhymes. As we learn about the various suspects, we're not just building scenarios and detecting red herrings; we're also learning about people, observing their frailties, recognizing their illusions, and, above all, feeling their pain. Order is always restored at the end of a James novel, as formula requires, yet it is never without an overpowering sense of loss. Perhaps that is the real mark of James' genius and her enduring popularity in a very un-classical 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. (Reviewed January 1, 1995)0679438890Bill Ott

A sprawling paean to the Thames River and its London environs, James's 12th novel and latest mystery to feature New Scotland Yard Commander Adam Dalgleish is set in the modern publishing world where traditions may crumble but where such timeless emotions as grief, rage and love prevail. Peverell Press, which occupies the magnificent Innocent House, modeled on the palaces of Venice and built by the firm's founder in 1792, has been plagued by the misdeeds-misplaced manuscripts, lost illustrations-of an unknown ``office menace'' since the death, nine months earlier, of managing director Henry Peverell. The stakes are upped when a senior editor, recently sacked by the new director Gerard Etienne, kills herself. When Etienne is found dead in the same room, Dalgleish is called in to investigate. He discovers that plenty of people, including the four other partners in the firm and various employees whose jobs are threatened by Etienne's plans to sell Innocent House and modernize the firm, had reason to wish Etienne dead. James (Devices and Desires) gives pride of place here to lush, leisurely descriptions of waterside London and the landscape of the Essex coast; Dalgleish and his assistants seem more observers than participants in this plot that ticks along on its own momentum, driven by the various suspects' motivations and actions to the credible, if not fully prepared for, resolution. BOMC selection; Random House Large Print edition (ISBN 0-679-76033-4); author tour. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The directors of London's venerable Peverell Press think that the suicide of senior editor Sonia Clements in the archive room of the firm's palatial offices in Innocent House is the last and most shocking episode in a series of disruptions to their business: some lost illustrations, a manuscript maliciously altered in proof, an unsigned note to one of the current authors pointing out that two other Peverell authors have recently died. But their troubles have only begun, as they learn when they open the office to discover the body of managing director Gerard Etienne dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. The death would look accidental if someone hadn't pried Etienne's dead jaws open and stuck inside the head of a stuffed snake, an office mascot called Hissing Sid, and the first question Commander Adam Dalgliesh (Devices and Desires, 1990, etc.) answers with his accustomed brilliance is what the snake is doing there. For the rest, the tale is little more than a series of interrogations, in James's most ceremonious style, of the surviving directors and the Peverell staff, designed to ferret out motives (there are many, ranging from professional revenge to the cash nexus) and alibis (everybody offers one); yet long before the hair-raising, if not entirely original, climax, you'll be enraptured by James's uncanny penetration into even the most minor functionaries, who live on the page with a fierce intensity even deeper than the mystery at Innocent House. One of James's most successful meldings of the old-fashioned whodunit onto the novel of character--a Middlemarch of the classic detective story. (First printing of 250,000; Book-of-the- Month Club main selection; author tour)