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A Certain Justice: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery (Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries)
by P. D. James
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (1997-11-25)
ISBN: 0375401091
EAN: 9780375401091
Dewey Decimal #: 823.914
Hardcover: 364 pages
Release Date: 1997-11-25
SKU: 01JB-003-7-0707
Condition: Near Fine VG+ First
Comments: First American Trade edition. Dust jacket very slightly rubbed/soiled, shows minor edgewear; Ends of spine very slightly bumped, minimal edgewear to boards. Nice copy. *International Buyers Welcome!* (except for prohibitively heavy items, as noted) - Satisfied customers in over 40 countries! We ship quickly and guarantee satisfaction. Your purchase helps support a U. Chicago student
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
It begins, dramatically enough, with a trial for murder. The distinguished criminal lawyer Venetia Aldridge is defending Garry Ashe on charges of having brutally killed his aunt. For Aldridge the trial is mainly a test of her courtroom skills, one more opportunity to succeed--and she does. But now murder is in the air. The next victim will be Aldridge herself, stabbed to death at her desk in her Chambers in the Middle Temple, a bloodstained wig on her head. Enter Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team, whose struggle to investigate and understand the shocking events cannot halt the spiral into more horrors, more murders...
A Certain Justice is P.D. James at her strongest. In her first foray into the strange closed world of the Law Courts and the London legal community, she has created a fascinating tale of interwoven passion and terror. As each character leaps into unforgettable life, as each scene draws us forward into new complexities of plot, she proves yet again that no other writer can match her skill in combining the excitement of the classic detective story with the richness of a fine novel. In its subtle portrayal of morality and human behavior, A Certain Justice will stand alongside Devices and Desires and A Taste for Death as one of P.D. James's most important, accomplished and entertaining works.
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Amazon.com Review
Although A Certain Justice begins with news of a murder, the victim isn't set to die for another four weeks. Publicly respected but privately loathed, Venetia Aldridge has far more enemies than a brilliant London criminal lawyer should--and at least one of them is determined to do her in. Venetia plies her superior trade in courts that harbor "the illusion that the passions of men were susceptible to order and control," but her past and private life are exceedingly unruly. Her married lover is intent on giving her up; her daughter loathes her; her fellow barristers are determined that she not become the next head of chambers. Even the cleaning women seems to have something on her. The outline alone of this complex novel would take pages (as would the eclectic inventory of players), but P. D. James makes us admire far more than her brilliantly developed plot. James in fact creates a crowded gallery of surprisingly decent suspects, along with one suitably vile creature--who happens to be Aldridge's last client. A superior murder mystery, A Certain Justice is also a gripping anatomy of wild justice. James's characters can be overcome by hate, but she is equally concerned with love's manifestations--human, divine, destructive, and healing.
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Customer Reviews
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Better than most, but not the best Dalgliesh
Rating  (3)
Date: 2008-11-28
I've read most of James' Dalgliesh mysteries and this was by far my least favorite. Which is not to say that it wasn't good - I have yet to read a P.D. James mystery that isn't engaging and well written. It's just to say that compared to her other mysteries, this one was lacking. It seemed like the main plot (the death of a criminal attorney) was lost in the subplot about the attorney's daughter. The denouement of the subplot was great, in my opinion (well-paced, exciting), but the denouement of the main plot seemed tacked on. The impression I have is that James wrote a draft of the book in which one character was the murderer but decided that was too facile or something, rewrote the ending and added scenes in the beginning and middle so that a different character was now the murderer. It feels like the daughter-sub-plot denouement was meant to be the end of the book and the resolution of the central murder feels tacked on. However, just because I was disappointed that it wasn't quite as complete and satisfying as the rest of the Dalgliesh series, that doesn't mean I didn't enjoy it. If it were written by someone else, I would have given it 4 stars, but I know that James is capable of a more satisfying book.
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An exciting listen.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-08-30
The story line is great with a really surprising twist at the end. My experience was not that of reading the book but rather listening to the book. Michael Jayston, narrator, is wonderful. His presentation of the author's words makes the characters come to life. It's an enjoyable story. Good for a long car trip.
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An Injustice to the reader
Rating  (2)
Date: 2008-06-20
0 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Another extremely long P D. James novel, of the sort she has been writing since A Taste for Death, with more emphasis on loving descriptions of room interiors and architecture than on an ingenious puzzle plot. Here the plot if especially disappointing, with one element evidently borrowed from Agatha Christie's Witness for the Prosecution (the eyeglasses of the trial witness) and very little emphasis on ratiocination on the part of her detectives. Part of the solution is handed to Dalgleish in a confession, the rest he obtains by sheer guesswork, as other reviews have pointed out. The final explanation is one of the most improbable, uninspired fizzles in her work. James might as well have selected the killer randomly.
Do characterization and writing compensate for the poor puzzle? Frankly, no. The opening situation is the standard business where an unlikeable person, in this care the lawyer Venetia Aldridge, goes around giving an implausibly large number of people some reason to kill her. After she is finally slain, Dalgleish and his team show up and ask a lot of questions, but get nowhere. Eventually there is a confession to one element, then a long thrill section where a killer is pursued (this reads like James was writing it for the inevitable television adaptation). Then Dalgleish pulls the ultimate solution out of his hat. Along the way, we get a lot of characters, but very few of them are developed (despite all the verbiage). Venetia herself, who starts off as an interesting character, becomes almost an afterthought after her murder. We also get James' usual social observations, with an occasional conservative sentiment concerning the decline of religion or the rise of political correctness, but none of this really adds up to an interesting novel.
Earlier James novels like A Mind to Murder and Shroud for a Nightingale, written at a time when Agatha Christie and Nagio Marsh were still alive, show much great ingenuity with plot and have good writing and characterization as well. James' novels for the last twenty years are much longer yet less satisfying.
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Ghastly Tragic Reality Packaged in Mystery Writing
Rating (5)
Date: 2008-05-09
This book illustrates an exciting era where meritocracy, equality, tradition and status quo collide with one another each with undeniable force and most unequivocally where the idea of "tyranny of majority" put forward by an English author John Stuart Mill is viciously challenged by an idea put forward by Korean psychology experts who believe "the tyrannized minority is giving people above them what they want because those below believe that they 'know' what those traditionally held power want." P.D. James' courageous publication of such a fact pattern in fiction form in this book offers simultaneously bone chilling suspense as well as refreshingly gratifying relief. This book reminds me that it is appropriate to pray that God grants each of us the courage to disagree, be different and be the person God meant us to be by shedding hautiness developed from certain associations inflicting in some perilous projection and dull mind.
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Just average
Rating (3)
Date: 2008-03-05
Like most of James's books, this one was a bit slow to start. There are a bunch of characters all introduced and it takes a bit of time to sort them all out. And, I admit, I thought the middle of this story dragged a bit more than a lot of the others. It just didn't grab me in quite the same way, perhaps because I had no feelings one way or the other about many of the characters - including the deceased. Still, the story came together in the end, even though it was a little bit of a stretch plot-wise. Not the type of mystery you're likely to be able to solve yourself, with all the odd twists and turns. But it was those odd twists that, in the end, kept it interesting.
It's worth reading, but not the best P.D. James book by a long shot. Two better ones that leap to mind, for me, are The Murder Room and The Lighthouse.
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