When the body of Sally Jupp is discovered in her bedroom – the door bolted from the inside – the occupants of Martingale House are sure that the blame for this unthinkable crime will fall on an unknown intruder. But each of the household is hiding a secret that could shed light on the murder.

And there’s only one man who can sift through the layers of deceit and pretence to unmask the truth: Detective Chief Inspector Adam Dalgleish.

‘Cover Her Face was P.D. James’ debut novel and the first book in the fourteen-book Adam Dalgliesh series. This was my first time reading a P.D. James novel, and I was impressed.

I loved the calm cadence of her language. The story provided a wonderful contemporary window into village life in England in 1960. My first impression was that if Barbara Pym had written a mystery novel, it might have opened like this.

The plot was a variant of a locked room mystery, but the attention was less on the mechanics of the murder than on the motive for it. Investigating the lives of the suspect pool gave an insight into the changing class structure of post-World War II England. We saw the disintegration of a gentry that was no longer financially secure, epitomised by the slow, quiet descent of the patriarch into death, and the lingering stigma of being an unmarried mother, and the refusal of the unmarried mother at the centre of everything to be cowed by it was a sign of the slackening grip of shame-enforced convention on the young.

I liked the inclusion of a suspect who was perfectly respectable but was also, thanks to his work as a spy in France during the war, both an experienced killer and a torture survivor. The taken-for-granted nature of this in a contemporary novel highlighted a seldom commented on societal legacy of the Second World War.

Dalgliesh’s remorseless patience was quite intimidating. There was no grandstanding or wild theorising, just an implacable determination to discover the truth.

I thought the Poirot-style gather-everyone-in-the-library denouement might spoil the book, but P.D. James pulled it off, mostly by making it about extracting confession from the guilty rather than about exercising the ego of the detective. I was blindsided by the outcome but, in retrospect, it made perfect sense,

I particularly enjoyed Daniel Weyman’s calm, precise narration. I’ll be continuing the series with his narration of ‘A Mind For Murder’. Click on the YouTube link below to hear a sample of his work.