A Taste for Death
P. D. James, 1986
Two bodies found by a canal in Paddington, a ten-year-old thief with a taste for smoked salmon, and Dalgliesh picking through the parish's polite secrets.
P. D. James
James published her first novel at forty-two while working full time in hospital administration, and later sat as a London magistrate — two careers' worth of evidence about how institutions behave.
Feels like curiosity, death and morality.
The horror of a cold corpse, delivered in the most sterile, official tone.
ONEThe bodies were discovered at eight forty-five on the morning of Wednesday 18 September by Miss Emily Wharton, a sixty-five-year-old spinster of the parish of St. Matthew’s in Paddington, London, and Darren Wilkes, aged ten, of no particular parish as far as he knew or cared. This unlikely pair of companions had left Miss Wharton’s flat in Crowhurst Gardens just before half past eight to walk the half-mile stretch of the Grand Union Canal to St. Matthew’s Church. Books by P. D. James
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