- Paperback: 64 pages
- Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd; Reprint edition (6 May 2005)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0141022574
- ISBN-13: 978-0141022574
- Product Dimensions: 17.2 x 10.6 x 0.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,008,139 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
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"People" P. D. James is "the greatest living mystery writer."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
Stunning paperback repackages celebrating the world's pre-eminent crime writer and over forty years of detective fiction.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
70 of 72 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
PD James produces superbly written, intricately detailed and meticulously crafted detective stories. Innocent Blood, however, is a departure from her usual whodunits as neither Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh nor the young private detective Cordelia Gray is featured, and there is no crime to detect. Of the two murders that permeate the story, one happened ten years ago; the murderers were brought to justice and the crime itself, once front-page news, is now nearly forgotten. The other murder is yet to happen, and we watch it being planned.
The book is set in 1978 (it was written in 1980) and takes as its starting point the Children's Act of 1975, by which adopted adults had, for the first time in Britain, the right of access to their original birth certificates, and thereby the means of tracing their natural parents. Philippa Palfrey is intellectual, privileged and gifted, and was adopted at the age of eight into an affluent but emotionally stunted family. Apart from a few flashes of memory, she has no recollection of her life before the adoption; all that she knows of her background is what her adoptive parents have told her and the cosy fantasies she has constructed for herself...it is a tribute to James' powerful writing that, even when you know it's coming, the moment that Philippa quite casually learns the truth is still shocking...
Philippa is not an appealing heroine but her arrogance hides her insecurity and desperate need to belong. Her emotional awakening and eventual self-realisation is one of the key themes of the book. But it's also a study of deceit: lies told for good or selfish reasons, how they alter the course of a life, and the way we blindly and wilfully collude in our own deception. It's an emotionally harrowing book, but utterly absorbing. James' descriptions of people, even of minor characters, are vivid; her locations, the different 'villages' of London in particular, are so accurately detailed that I had to check my A to Z to be certain that the roads in which her characters live are fictional; I first read this book in one sitting; I found it impossible to put down. It's a tour de force by an intelligent and accomplished writer who is also deeply compassionate, and the book ends with the promise that one of those who had been as dead has at last discovered the way back to life. If you only read one PD James book, read this one. Better still, read them all.
34 of 35 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I bought this book to read if I got really bored on holiday. In the end the holiday had to be worked round the book as it refused to be put down. A departure from P D James' more usual "detective novel", this story seems closer to the Ruth Rendell-as-Barbara Vine physcological thriller. The plot is centred on a past murder and its drastic reprocussions for two very different people caught up in its wake.
The novel is beautifully written with vivid descriptions of people and places and enough sense of impending disaster to keep you reading. I particulary liked the way in which one character's plans to commit a violent act of revenge were described in a completely deadpan way as if he was planning something as harmless as his annual holiday. This technique simply made the story all the more disturbing.
Gripping stuff!
44 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The material is excellent: Philippa was adopted as a child. She has now turned 18 and can claim her original birth certificate - and seek out her natural mother. Philippa has grown up in the comfortable home of a celebrated academic, she is breezing through her A levels with distinction, a place at Oxford awaits her. All is secure. Until the birth certificate arrives and she makes a shocking discovery whose consequences provide the rest of the story.
Good stuff. You really feel for such a heroine, don't you? Well no, not this heroine, that's the trouble. In order to maximize the impact of the forthcoming revelations, the author has drawn Philippa as a cold and frighteningly superior young woman. And unfortunately she has succeeded in this only too well. Philippa is simply insufferable, and however much fortune rocks her stable surroundings she never loses that cold glitter of intellectual disdain. The other major character is Maurice, her adoptive father the academic, and he isn't much better either. When his first wife died Maurice married Hilda who, to please him, has become a fabulous cook, hostess and homemaker. But poor Hilda is uneducated and deplorably lower middle-class, so both Maurice & Philippa treat her with a kind of well-bred contempt. "We both wish we could love Hilda" Maurice says. Well yes, so did I, Maurice. And perhaps that is all it would have taken to redeem this book: a little less sneering and a tad more affection. A touch of ordinary, unexceptional, uncelebrated, non-class-conscious human feeling.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
The opening chapters to ORIGINAL SIN sold in extract form
This Pocket Penguin consists of the opening chapters from P. D. James's novel, ORIGINAL SIN, and is designed as a taster to read the longer book. Read more
Published 15 months ago by quippe
Intriguing
This was my first P.D. James and I'll definitely be reading more.
Innocent Blood tells the story of Philippa Palfrey, an 18 year old who was adopted at age 8. Read more
Innocent Blood tells the story of Philippa Palfrey, an 18 year old who was adopted at age 8. Read more
Published on 15 Nov 2009 by Blatant Biblioholic
Promising but dull
I am sorry to be so blunt.
My early assumption was that the story line had an intriguing ring: London, end of the 70s. Read more
My early assumption was that the story line had an intriguing ring: London, end of the 70s. Read more
Published on 3 Feb 2008 by I LOVE BOOKS
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