The Black Tower

P. D. James takes her best-known detective to the Dorset coast in this murder mystery. Awakening on his sick bed to a deepening sense of his own mortality, Adam Dalgliesh fights with his illness and finds himself embroiled in a thrilling murder investigation packed with lies, suspicion and deceit. Commander Dalgliesh is recuperating from a life-threatening illness when he receives a call for advice from an elderly friend who works as a chaplain in a home for the disabled on the Dorset coast. Dalgliesh arrives to discover that Father Baddeley has recently and mysteriously died, as has one of the patients at Toynton Grange. Evidently the home is not quite the caring community it purports to be. Dalgliesh is determined to discover the truth of his friend’s death, but further fatalities follow and his own life is in danger as he unmasks the evil at the heart of Toynton Grange. The Black Tower is the fifth novel in the Adam Dalgliesh series, a thrilling work of crime fiction that explores the mysterious and intense emotions responsible for the unique crime of murder, with authority and sensitivity. This novel won the Silver Dagger award for crime fiction and was adapted for television in 1985, starring Roy Marsden, Martin Jarvis and John Franklyn-Robbins.