Unnatural Causes

Unnatural Causes

First edition (UK)
Author P. D. James
Country United Kingdom
Language English
Series Adam Dalgliesh #3
Genre Crime/Mystery novel
Publisher Faber and Faber
Publication date
1967
Media type Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages 236 pp
ISBN NA
Preceded by A Mind to Murder
Followed by Shroud for a Nightingale

You may be looking for UNNATURAL CAUSES: Is Inequality Making Us Sick?, a documentary series broadcast on PBS in 2008.

Unnatural Causes (1967) is a detective novel by English crime writer P. D. James.

Synopsis

While staying with his Aunt Jane in Suffolk, Adam Dalgliesh stumbles across a most bizarre and frightening murder. A local detective novelist, Maurice Seton, becomes himself the subject of investigation when his boat washes ashore with his body inside, with both his hands cut off, seemingly with a meat cleaver. Strangely, the scene of his death is mirrored in a manuscript for the new thriller he was writing...

Literary significance and criticism

Something of a letdown. The country-house setting and the characterization of the unfortunate criminal are excellently handled, and the powerful ending under rushing waters is both credible and mysterious, but the method of murder as well as its cause is farfetched. Dalgleish has had a tiff with his lover and lets her go out of his life in a psychologically odd instance of inaction. What next?[1] - Catalogue of Crime

References

  1. Barzun, Jacques and Taylor, Wendell Hertig. A Catalogue of Crime. New York: Harper & Row. 1971, revised and enlarged edition 1989. ISBN 0-06-015796-8