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    Devices and Desires: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery
    Unavailable
    Devices and Desires: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery
    Unavailable
    Devices and Desires: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery
    Audiobook18 hours

    Devices and Desires: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery

    Written by P. D. James

    Narrated by Penelope Dellaporta

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    National Bestseller

    Featuring the famous Commander Adam Dalgliesh, Devices and Desires is a thrilling and insightfully crafted novel of fallible people caught in a net of secrets, ambitions, and schemes on a lonely stretch of Norfolk coastline.

    Commander Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard has just published a new book of poems and has taken a brief respite from publicity on the remote Larksoken headland on the Norfolk coast in a converted windmill left to him by his aunt. But he cannot so easily escape murder. A psychotic strangler of young women is at large in Norfolk, and getting nearer to Larksoken with every killing. And when Dalgliesh discovers the murdered body of the Acting Administrative Officer on the beach, he finds himself caught up in the passions and dangerous secrets of the headland community and in one of the most baffling murder cases of his career.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJun 28, 2005
    ISBN9781415926161
    Unavailable
    Devices and Desires: An Adam Dalgliesh Mystery
    Author

    P. D. James

    P. D. James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford in 1920. She worked in the National Health Service and the Home Office From 1949 to 1968, in both the Police Department and Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy, and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature. She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991.

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    Reviews for Devices and Desires

    4/5

    527 ratings14 reviews

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    • 4/5
      James' breakaway from the pure British cozy format. Much better than some of her earlier works. Conveys the horror of violent death on several levels.
    • 2/5
      I hadn't read an Adam Dalgliesh novel in ten years when I started this. I feared I would find it more sobering than entertaining and I was right. P. D. James writes mysteries that have all the qualities of a serious realist novel: grim detail, much of it psychological, little humor, no conscious parody or camp. She is a very facile writer: characters, places, situations, motivations are described in detail in the classic realist manner. She is adequate at mystery and better at suspense. She has here two horrific scenes of violence that are hard to forget. She has one fault I can't stand. Everybody in the book talks like an Eton graduate. When a frigging tramp started talking like everyone, I nearly threw the book against the wall.
    • 4/5
      “’The victim's hair was damp, which suggests she died after her swim and not before it’"In “Devices and Desires” by P. D. JamesI’m no detective but that is some incredible deduction Dalgliesh…I'm only going to be on this earth for a limited amount of time, and in all likelihood I won't manage in that time to get through all the great books that have ever been written. But I should at least try my best to. I only re-read books if it's so long since I read them that I barely remember them at all, (and even then it's rare). My bookshelves are heaving with books, and I buy them quicker than I read them, so I've got to try my hardest to keep up. And I certainly can't help thinking that if one is re-reading the same book every year, one could do with broadening our horizons a bit. Nevertheless, re-reading should be adopted by all serious readers. Last year I went through some of my favourite SF books of all-time, and what a joyous ride it’s been. Unfortunately that particular objective kept me away from reading some new stuff coming out. Moreover, to re-read a good book lifts the soul, but to re-read one twice or more puts authors on the dole….lol.Now that spring is here and summer is just around the corner (the temperature here right now is 29ºC…), it’s time to decide what to read. Why summer? Because summer is the season when some people read books, you smugly. Flat on your back in the hotel bedroom you'll watch dumbfounded as your wife assembles a great leaning tower of books, and leaves you lying there alone. Your friend Saramago will tell you he's casually re-reading “Anna Karenina” - time to hide folks! The most common use of the expression is simply to show off, that you are so clever that you re-read. No-one talks about reading tin labels. But some people who re-read books are not well read at all, because they've only read Shakespeare (it’s me I’m talking about). Another reason someone might re-read a book is because they haven't understood it from the blurb the first time (this is also me I’m talking about). This is criminal. So think twice before not re-reading this summer. As for me, I'll be re-re-[…]-reading "Devices and Desires" again any time soon.Bottom-line: Knew about P.D. James' work when I borrowed one of her books in The British Council Lisbon's library way back in the late 80s. I got hooked ever since.
    • 4/5
      Good solid middle-period P.D. James murder mystery. Lots of East Anglian atmosphere - Norfolk not Suffolk for once - and maybe a bit too much plot, with the standard PDJ theme (murder of an unpleasantly pushy career-woman who’s made an implausible number of enemies) being obfuscated by two other big plot-threads, one about a serial killer and the other about the safety of nuclear power. All very elegantly woven together, in the best possible taste, so that it's difficult even to work up much irritation about the author’s all too familiar right-wing prejudices.
    • 3/5
      Not one of her best, but intriguing considering the fact that the back story is about a nuclear power plant and they are much in the news these days.
    • 5/5
      I decided to read all of the Adam Daigliesh mysteries in one fell swoop and am glad I did. First, they are classic British mysteries all well-deserving of the respect P.D. James has earned for them and all are a good read. However, what is interesting is to watch the author develop her style from the early ones to the later ones. And, in fact, A Shroud for a Nightingale and The Black Tower (the fourth and fifth in the series) is where she crosses the divide. The later books have much more character development -- both for the players and the detectives -- make Dalgleish more rounded and are generally much more than a good mystery yarn -- they're fine novels that happen to be mysteries. The first three books (Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes) are just that much more simplistic. But read any or all -- she's a great writer and they are definitely worth the time.
    • 4/5
      I find P.D.James to be a strange writer. In some ways, she is excellent – she has a good grasp of what makes a certain class of person tick, and the relationships that exist in British society. I was re-reading this – though I find Adam Dalgliesh to be a rather irritating protagonist, for reasons I am not wholly sure of, the sweep of the stories carries me along, and the East Anglian settings always appeal. But at the same time that the stories are good, they often involve a heavy dash of willing suspension of belief, and though life is sometimes stranger than fiction, the coincidences sometimes come too fast and furious for realistic comfort.One thing I noticed is that P.D.James and I write in rather similar ways – not that I put myself in the same league as her, but the faults I notice in her writing are ones I notice in my own. Her characters talk in whole perfectly rounded sentences, somewhat unnaturally, but expressing their thoughts clearly through their words – so do mine. Her characters also talk to themselves (without punctuation) – and so do mine. As I say, her plots are more coherent and better than mine, but there are similarities in the way we treat characters. I am not sure why Dalgliesh irritates me - maybe for the same reasons that he irritates himself.Anyway, Devices and Desires is one of the more enjoyable escapist ways of passing an evening
    • 4/5
      Classic Brit mystery -- a limited number of people in a confined place, every one of them with a motive. This isn't my favorite of hers, but it's still first rate.
    • 3/5
      I like Dalgleish crime books and this one was as good as any.
    • 4/5
      Not sure if I actually read the same book as all the other reviewers. Certainly the focus is more on characterization and less on gently doling out clues so the reader can solve the mystery, but that is a positive of the book. Has the irritating, showy quality of the detective finding the body himself - I always hate those sorts of coincidences, but I suppose it was the easiest way to get Dalgliesh involved in a case where he was so far out of his jurisdiction. The characters are drawn lushly, not only as characters but as people with good motives for murder. One character does combine cunning and strength of character with an almost ludicrous naivete. When I found out the identity of the murderer, I didn't find it to be particularly surprising or predictable, but I thought the way the murderer was revealed to the reader was superbly written, and the murderer's fate was perfectly in character, neatly foreshadowed, and had nice historical touches.I haven't read all that many of P.D. James's books, but this one might have been my favorite so far.
    • 4/5
      It begins with a serial killer stalking lone women up and down the coast of Norfolk, England. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is trying to take a holiday in nearby, sleepy Larksoken where his aunt has willed him a quaint windmill/cottage. His vacation is cut short when the killer takes one of Larsoken's own. Adding to the drama is a highly controversial atomic power station, a lover's tryst and blackmail. Dalgliesh does his best to assist the local authorities but there is controversy even there as he has a not so pleasant history with Rickards, the lead on the case.As with all small towns the entire community is well embroiled in each other's lives. They seem to know everything about one another yet no one suspects the real killer.
    • 3/5
      Good topics but dull. The detective doesn't do anything and doesn't tell the reader anything. Stuff happends.
    • 4/5
      Crime novels not usually my cup of tea. Either because they work best on TV such as Miss Marples et al or Inspector Morse or because you know by the plot by the 2nd page. She like a handful of others such as the very different Elmore John Leonard create via their writing a world in which the moral actions of their characters make sense
    • 4/5
      This was a good mystery, but it just doesn't hang together as well as the other James mysteries I've read recently. My main problem was a red herring that appeared rather late in the book with very little warning, which struck me as being somewhat unbelievable and needlessly dramatic. Overall the novel felt overly long and overly confusing, without the same kind of tight plotting that I've come to expect from James.