Sometimes the passing of an author triggers our first read to her novels. I read “Cover her face’ by P.D. James who lived her last day in November this year, at age 94. She was an English crime writer and was well known for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh. P.D. James has three books on the top 100 crime novels of all time.
‘Cover her face’ is the debut of her crime novel and its character Adam Dalgliesh in 1962. It details the investigations by detective A
dam Dalgliesh into the death of a young, sly and secretive maid, surrounded by a family which has reasons to want her gone. Sally Jupp is an unmarried mother, recently accepted into Eleanor Maxie’s household as a maid. She used her ways to seduce a romantic relationship with Eleanor’s son Stephen, and has earned herself haters more than friends. In the morning after she announced that Stephen has proposed to her, she was discovered dead on her bed with bruises from a strangler’s fingers forever on her throat. It is up to chief inspector Adam Dalgliesh to uncover the life of Sally Jupp, and who that murderer is.
Some crime novels have intertwined and sophisticated plot which invites the intelligent readersto join the detective work, such as the novel ‘Devotion of Suspect X’. Some are more like the plot follows the characters, such as ‘The cuckoo’s calling by Robert Galbraith’. ‘Cover her face’ belongs more to the latter category, it has a good plot, though the murderer could also be anybody’s guess and it is up to the author, or the detective Adam, to walk us through, at the end, how it plays out.
D. James, bring alive the characters, and offers a vivid landscape of the crime scene. There is so much to like about the writing style of P.D. James and its characters.
The story started with this poetic introduction
“Exactly three months before the killing at Martingale Mrs. Maxie gave a dinner party. Years later, when the trial was a half-forgotten scandal and the headlines were yellowing on the newspaper lining of cupboard drawers, Eleanor Maxie looked back on that spring evening as the opening scene of tragedy.’ And what follows is her skillful portrait of her family, their friends and the community around. The crime surfaces at the end of chapter 3, after much anticipation, followed by the debut of Chief Inspector Adam from Scotland Yard. 
Adam started the investigation with 1-on-1 meetings with each character. His intelligence and experience is beyond doubts, there is little coverage on Adam as a person, yet when his thought ‘I have no son. My own child and his mother died three hours after he was born’ tells a lot when he was posed the question ‘Would you wish for such a marriage for your son?’ by Eleanor Maxie. And as the story ends, ‘he knew with sudden and heart-lifting certainty that they (Eleanor’s daughter and him) would meet again. And when that happened, the right words would be found’. It leaves a lot to uncover about the character in the novels to follow.
oliviatamccue 
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