The Lighthouse (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #13)

商家名称	信用等级	购买信息	订购本书
		The Lighthouse (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #13)
		The Lighthouse (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #13)

基本信息·出版社：Alfred A. Knopf
·页码：352 页
·出版日期：2005年11月
·ISBN：030726291X
·International Standard Book Number：030726291X
·条形码：9780307262912
·EAN：9780307262912
·装帧：精装
·正文语种：英语

内容简介 A subtle and powerful work of contemporary fiction.

Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is bizarrely murdered.

Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery quickly and discreetly, but at a difficult time for him and his depleted team. Dalgliesh is uncertain about his future with Emma Lavenham, the woman he loves; Detective Inspector Kate Miskin has her own emotional problems; and the ambitious Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith is worried about working under Kate. Hardly has the team begun to unravel the complicated motives of the suspects than there is a second brutal killing, and the whole investigation is jeopardized when Dalgliesh is faced with a danger more insidious and as potentially fatal as murder.

This eagerly awaited successor to the international bestseller The Murder Room displays all the qualities that lovers of P. D. James’s novels the world over have come to expect: sensitive characterization, an exciting and superbly structured plot and vivid evocation of place.
作者简介 P. D. James is the author of 18 books, most of which have been filmed for television. Before her retirement in 1979, she served in the forensics and criminal justice departments of Great Britain’s Home Office, and she has been a magistrate and a governor of the BBC. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. In 2000 she celebrated her 80th birthday and published her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest.
编辑推荐 “With her trademark blend of subtle characterization, vivid sense of place and deceptively simple plot, James pulls off another triumph. A beautifully written page-turner from the queen of the genre.”
—Toronto Sun

“An elegant and perceptive writer – rich drifts of prose pile up on the page, descriptive passages are Dickensian in length, ornament and power. . . James’s many fans will relish The Lighthouse, for all its poise and narrative familiarity.”
—The Globe and Mail

“James’s gifts animate and transform the armature into something exceptional. Her disciplined conventions, her observation of social and class niceties, renew the traditional Franco-British drama of domestic crime. She is a very superior writer of detection.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“James has proven that she deserves her reputation as our leading ‘literary’ crime writer. The Lighthouse confirms that she is also the most enjoyable.”
—Daily Express

Praise for P.D. James:
"A first-rate writer without any qualifying genre tag."
—Newsweek

"[James] ought never to be confused with such practitioners of the murder-in-the-vicarage genre as Agatha Christie. She is subtler, more sophisticated, much more adept at creating character and her social conservatism gives her a much darker view of human nature."
—Martin Levin, The Globe and Mail

"James’s novels are an escape like no other. . . . Masterful writing."
—The Vancouver Sun

"She writes like an angel. Every character is closely drawn. Her atmosphere is unerringly, chillingly convincing. And she manages all this without for a moment slowing down the drive and tension of an exciting mystery."
—The Times (UK)

"[James] suffuses The Murder Room with an intelligence and a perceptivity of human nature that seems casually placed. But that’s part of her genius. A grand design is there, but not readily apparent. Dalgliesh is one of the smartest, gentlest and most restrained cops to ever adorn a page. Moreover, every character, even minor characters, come across as fully realized.
—Winnipeg Free Press
专业书评 From Publishers Weekly

British master James's 13th Adam Dalgliesh mystery, like its two predecessors, The Murder Room (2003) and Death in Holy Orders (2001), focuses at first on a hostile character who threatens to shatter a longstanding way of life. Acclaimed novelist Nathan Oliver incurs the wrath of his fellow residents on Combe Island, a private property off the Cornish coast used as an exclusive retreat by movers and shakers in many fields. When Oliver is murdered, Scotland Yard dispatches Dalgliesh and two of his team to Combe, where the commander checks alibis and motives in his trademark understated manner. Because the detective's new romantic attachment is more of a backstory than in The Murder Room, it intrudes less on the murder inquiry. The solution, which hinges on the existence of an unknown child, is less than fully satisfactory and also borrows elements from some of James's recent plots. Devotees more interested in her hero's personal growth than his deductive technique will find much to enjoy.
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* At 85, the remarkable P. D. James has written one of her most moving novels. As she has done throughout her career, she sticks closely to formula in the shape of her mystery story but injects her characters with a range of emotions and subtlety of motive that lifts the proceedings well beyond the level of a puzzle and its solution. In the past, she has often isolated her group of victims and suspects by homing in on a particular profession, but this time she uses an even more classic mystery device: an isolated location. Combe Island, off the Cornish coast of England, was once a pirates' enclave but is now used as a retreat for powerful people who need time to recharge their batteries, making it all the more shocking when one of the guests is found murdered. Commander Adam Dalgleish is called to the politically sensitive scene to investigate. The action plays out pretty much as it has in 19 previous James' novels: Dalgleish and his team--Inspector Kate Miskin and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith--interview the finite group of suspects, making deductions along the way until the commander puts all the pieces together. But it's what happens between the lines that gives James' stories their punch: the tension between Miskin and the ambitious sergeant; the added frisson that comes from Dalgleish finally having a personal life but being unable to move forward with his lover, Emma; and, of course, the personal lives of the various suspects, all of whom James treats with unmatched depth and care. Each new Dalgleish novel should be treated as a gift by mystery fans everywhere. Bill Ott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
文摘 Commander Adam Dalgliesh was not unused to being urgently summoned to non-scheduled meetings with unspecified people at inconvenient times, but usually with one purpose in common: he could be confident that somewhere there lay a dead body awaiting his attention. There were other urgent calls, other meetings, sometimes at the highest level. Dalgliesh, as a permanent ADC to the Commissioner, had a number of functions which, as they grew in number and importance, had become so ill-defined that most of his colleagues had given up trying to define them. But this meeting, called in Assistant Commissioner Harkness’s office on the seventh floor of New Scotland Yard at ten-fifty-five on the morning of Saturday, 23 October, had, from his first entry into the room, the unmistakable presaging of murder. This had nothing to do with a certain serious tension on the faces turned towards him; a departmental debacle would have caused greater concern. It was rather that unnatural death always provoked a peculiar unease, an uncomfortable realisation that there were still some things that might not be susceptible to bureaucratic control.

There were only three men awaiting him and Dalgliesh was surprised to see Alexander Conistone of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He liked Conistone, who was one of the few eccentrics remaining in an increasingly conformist and politicised service. Conistone had acquired a reputation for crisis management. This was partly founded on his belief that there was no emergency that was not amenable to precedent or departmental regulations, but when these orthodoxies failed, he could reveal a dangerous capacity for imaginative initiatives which, by any bureaucratic logic, deserved to end in disaster but never did. Dalgliesh, for whom few of the labyrinths of Westminster bureaucracy were wholly unfamiliar, had earlier decided that this dichotomy of character was inherited. Generations of Conistones had been soldiers. The foreign fields of Brit
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