Combe Island off the Cornish coast has a bloodstained history of piracy and cruelty but now, privately owned, it offers respite to over-stressed men and women in positions of high authority who require privacy and guaranteed security. But the peace of Combe is violated when one of the distinguished visitors is found hanging from Combe's famous lighthouse. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the mystery quickly and discreetly, but at a difficult...

Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his team are called in to investigate a murder at a private nursing home for rich patients being treated by the famous plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell.

Collected in this book are four murder mystery short stories by P.D. James, all centered around Christmas and two of which feature the young poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh. In the title story, a bestselling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier. In "A Very Commonplace Murder," a "pedantic, respectable, censorious" clerk's secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward...

Commander Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard gets involved in the investigation of a psychopathic strangler of young women in the Norfolk area.