An Unsuitable Job for a Womanby P.D. James
Rating: ★★★
Series: Cordelia Gray #1
Publication Date: January 1, 1972
Genre: crime, mystery
Pages: 256
ReRead?: Yes
Project: a century of women
Handsome Cambridge dropout Mark Callender died hanging by the neck with a faint trace of lipstick on his mouth. When the official verdict is suicide, his wealthy father hires fledgling private investigator Cordelia Gray to find out what led him to self-destruction. What she discovers instead is a twisting trail of secrets and sins, and the strong scent of murder. An Unsuitable Job for a Woman introduces P. D. James's courageous but vulnerable young detective, Cordelia Gray, in a top-rated puzzle of peril that holds you all the way
This is the first book in the Cordelia Gray duology. Cordelia Gray is P.D. James’s less well-known sleuth: a young private detective who more or less inherits a nearly bankrupt business when her mentor and former “partner” dies by suicide unexpectedly at the beginning of the book. She decides to carry on, and accepts her first case, which requires that she travel to Cambridge to try to determine why the young son of a prominent scientist has also committed suicide.
While I enjoyed this book, I don’t think that this book is nearly as good as her Adam Dalgleish series, which I am in the process of rereading. I’m sure I’ll pick up the sequel to this one, just for the sake of completion.
Death of an Expert Witnessby P.D. James
Rating: ★★★★
Series: Adam Dalgleish #6
Publication Date: January 1, 1977
Genre: crime, mystery
Pages: 368
ReRead?: Yes
Dr. Lorrimer appeared to be the picture of a bloodless, coldly efficient scientist. Only when his brutally slain body is discovered and his secret past dissected does the image begin to change. Once again, Chief Inspector Adam Dalgliesh learns that there is more to human beings than meets the eye -- and more to solving a murder than the obvious clues.
This installment in the Dalgleish series was really good. The victim, Dr. Lorrimer, is deeply, deeply unlikeable: bitter, mean, angry, and self-absorbed. While they aren’t any really great motives here, all of his acquaintances had some reason to dislike the victim. When he is bludgeoned to death in the lab, everyone is a suspect.
P.D. James develops the various characters – from the lab assistant that Lorrimer has tormented into a nervous breakdown, his colleagues, all of whom loathe him, his cousin, Angela, who is involved in a relationship with a woman and who was cut from her grandmother’s will in favor of Lorrimer, when she could very much have benefited from a legacy, to his lover, who has lost interest in him but he can’t let go.
Any of them had reason to have murdered him.
I didn’t solve the mystery, but I wasn’t surprised by the solution. The biggest surprise was that the victim lived as long as he did, given how horrible he was to the people around him.