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The Private Patient

Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Cheverell Manor is a lovely old house in deepest Dorset, now a private clinic belonging to the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell. When investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn arrived there one late autumn afternoon, scheduled to have a disfiguring and long-standing facial scar removed, she had every expectation of a successful operation and a pleasant week recuperating.
Two days later she was dead, the victim of murder.
To Commander Adam Dalgliesh, who with his team is called in to investigate the case, the mystery at first seems absolute. Few things about it make sense. Yet as the detectives begin probing the lives and backgrounds of those connected with the dead woman—the surgeon, members of the manor staff, close acquaintances—suspects multiply all too rapidly. New confusions arise, including strange historical overtones of madness and a lynching 350 years in the past. Then there is a second murder, and Dalgliesh finds himself confronted by issues even more challenging than innocence or guilt.
P. D. James has gained an enviable reputation for creating detective stories of uncommon depth and intricacy, combined with the sort of humanity and perceptiveness found only in the finest novelists. The Private Patient ranks among her very best.
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    • AudioFile Magazine
      P.D. James delivers another fascinating Adam Dalgliesh mystery. The enigmatic Scotland Yard commander investigates the murder of a journalist who is killed in a posh private clinic in Dorset just after undergoing plastic surgery. James's latest manages to plumb the depths of investigative journalism, probing tender secrets and sensational scandals. Environmental issues, aging, and the hope of new love are also part of the story. Roslyn Landor lends the characters' voices appropriate, subtle, and insightful tones that reflect their age, social standing, gender, and education. Overall, her clarity and soft British accent complement the fourteenth Dalgliesh outing. A finely crafted conundrum, intricately layered. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from September 22, 2008
      In James's stellar 14th Adam Dalgliesh mystery (after 2006's The Lighthouse
      ), the charismatic police commander knows the case of Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47-year-old journalist murdered soon after undergoing the removal of an old disfiguring scar at a private plastic surgery clinic in Dorset, may be his last; James's readers will fervently hope it isn't. Dalgliesh probes the convoluted tangle of motives and hidden desires that swirl around the clinic, Cheverell Manor, and its grimly fascinating suspects in the death of Gradwyn, herself “a stalker of minds” driven by her lifelong passion for rooting out the truth people would prefer left unknown and then selling it for money. Beyond the book's central moral concern, James meditates on universal problems like aging (“the amorphous flattening of self”) and the government's education policy, which targets 50% of the young as university-bound while ensuring that another 40% are uneducated on leaving secondary school. Against her relentless intellectual view of our dying earth, James pits the love she finally grants Dalgleish—sufficient to reinvigorate hope and faith so rare in both fiction and reality today.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from January 26, 2009
      The latest (and perhaps final) mystery featuring Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police Service finds him preparing to confront crucial turning points in his life and career. Meanwhile, he must solve the murder of a ruthlessly inquisitive investigative journalist who was killed in a private Dorset clinic just hours after a pre-eminent plastic surgeon removed her disfiguring facial scar. Dalgliesh and his team unearth a plethora of motives (and an ugly secret or three) as they investigate the inhabitants of the secluded manor that houses the clinic. Rosalyn Landor's lovely, well-bred tones add warmth, color and precision to this fully rounded, compassionately told mystery. She gives every character his or her own voice, clearly delineating gender, age and social class. Her voice combines with James's text to lend sympathy to each character, regardless of what sins he or she may have committed. In every way, this is a perfect auditory experience. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 22).

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