MURDER ROOM (UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOK) -- BARGAIN BOOK [Audio Cassette]

Dr Neville Dupayne, one of the three trustees of the museum, it being passed on to him and his brother and sister upon the death of their father, is found dead in a burning car near the museum, in a scenario exactly mirroring one of the cases featured in the bizarre Murder Room. And there is no lack of people with a motive, for the Dupayne is coming up for renewal of it's lease which, under the conditions of their late father's will, must be signed by all three trustees or become void, and Neville is the only one who refuses to sign. Yet there are several people whose futures have a strong stake in the future and continued running of the museum...

Then, mere days later, another body is found, once again killed in an identical manner to one of the cases from the Murder Room...

Perhaps not quite James's strongest novel, this is still a very good book, and will undoubtedly follow on the immense success of her last, Death in Holy Orders. As a novel, it is traditional in its form, but with James that means nothing, certainly not that you are in for anything like a "cosy" mystery. Content within the boundaries of the genre, she finds those limits not limiting at all, instead using them as foundations and support for an incredibly worthy novel that tells us much about the human condition and the society we, in England at least, live in. It is impeccably written (of course), socially interesting, with a strong sense of morality, and I doubt that there is a writer at work today who can more subtly but fully evoke a setting. Too, the eerie nostalgia of the museum itself is mirrored beautifully in both the story and the narrative prose itself.

Her characters are incredibly strong, they slink from the page fully-formed and ready for our judgement. They range from the sympathetic to the cold, from calculating to warm. Never are any of them less than human.

In the end, she presents a solution that is very satisfying not for that it is a bolt form the blue, but for that it is entirely sensible. She has you working out complicated solutions to the mystery, then presents you with an entirely plausible one that you never really even considerd, which is an admirable trait indeed in a world of fiction that is far too full of gratuitous unreality.

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I had fully expected that PD James's previous novel, _Death in Holy Orders_, was the conclusion to the Dalgliesh series, so I was thrilled to hear about _The Murder Room_ and have been anticipating it for some time. This seems to be quite a nostalgic work for Lady James, with more than a few echoes from her previous works and with far more insight into characters' (especially Dalgliesh's) innermost thoughts than we have previously seen. It's hard for me to recall when so many of the characters' thoughts in a PD James novel have been set aside in italics, and when she has shared so much of her thoughts (via her characters) on issues of class, racism, and sexuality. At the same time, this is also in my mind the most romantic novel she has written, with a moving homage to her favorite writer, Jane Austen.

On its own, _The Murder Room_ is a solid crime novel, with some macabre causes of death and fascinating glimpses into the history of crime (the "Murder Room" refers to a room in the Dupayne Museum devoted to memorabilia from famous crimes between the two World Wars; this echoes the room "Memento Mori" in _The Skull Beneath the Skin_). It is somewhat sparse on actual detection, but the prose is beautiful and the conclusion quite moving--profoundly so for this longtime admirer of PD James.

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