Ok. I kept reading and didn't put it down. It moved more slowly than I would have liked without benefit of compensating outstanding writing, characterization, etc. I bought another P.D. James book previously and now I'm not in a hurry to read it.

PD James reputation as a writer is well set and deservedly so but I found this particular book rather boring. It was more like a short story the author took and added an incredible amount of characterization, description, and unnecessary dialogue in order to make it novel length. I enjoy some character development but this book went way to far. After all. this is fiction and these people do not exists.

My husband and I listened to DEATH IN HOLY ORDERS by P.D. James on CD during a cross-country road trip through Big Sky Country—Montana. Even though the speed limit in the wide open expanse is already high (80 mph in many areas), we found ourselves pressing the accelerator with increasing intensity as the plot thickened with sinister twists and turns. We’ll definitely accompany Commander Adam Dalgliesh on future investigations!

Nice character development and interesting story in a scenic locale.

Couldn't finish. Too boring.

An ordinand at a remote clerical college dies suspiciously. His father, a wealthy man, gets Adam Dagliesh involved. Turns out Dagliesh had spent several summers there as a teen. When Dagliesh gets there, there's been a second death. The woman had a bad heart so it seems like she had a heart attack. But Dagliesh finds out the knitting in her hand was held improperly, and she had on the glasses she would have worn to watch TV.

The school is probably going to be closed, but the terms of the Arbuthnot will (the woman who left the college the land and buildings), the money from the property goes to the 4 priests in residence unless a legal heir to her father is found. Another death under Dagliesh's nose and he is right on the trail.

This is where he meets Emma who is there as a guest lecturer.

Dagliesh realizes it was a teacher who was the father of the ordinand. The ordinand was illegitimate and was left at the college and raised there. The dad had married the mom recently before she died, retroactively making the young man a legitimate heir and through mom, set to inherit the college.

Good mystery.

It has been quite some time since I have read any detective fiction and even longer since my last P.D. James. Whereas I still think she can write the pants off just about anyone else, I must say that this book was rather more formulaic than any I have ever read by her. The laughable premise that so many interrelated people could come to one obscure place at a particular time so as to make up the perfect plot for a mystery, not to mention the odd concatenation of events, including more deaths in a week than most of us witness in a lifetime are, I realize, part of the genre. But in this case it seems a bit more heavy-handed than James' usual adroit handling of such exposition. Still, this was a fine read and a compelling plot, as such things go.

I would've given this book three stars, but the treatment of the child-abuser priest makes that impossible for me. Every sympathetic character pities the child molester and thinks he's been hard done by, judging instead the man who investigated his crimes and put him in prison instead of letting him skate by with a slap on the wrist. If it was only a character or two, I could've written it off as individual characterization; but not when everyone in the novel is treating it like a benign peccadillo and the molester as persecuted and harmless.