A Certain Justice: An Adam Dalgliesh Novel

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Adam and Kate break Venetia’s death to her daughter Octavia and her boyfriend, who, it turns out, is Garry Ashe. Octavia is hostile, but to Adam and Kate’s frustration, both have an alibi for the time of the murder. Kate is furious, believing Garry is a psychopath and Octavia is in danger. He then finds Froggart, who, it turns out, was once a teacher at the school where Venetia’s father was headmaster. He has followed her career with admiration since, to the point of obsession with scrapbooks of press cuttings. He lets Dalgliesh take them to see if he can find anything to connect to the murder. To many outsiders, China has an image as a realm of Oriental despotism where law is at best window dressing and at worst an instrument of coercion and tyranny. In this highly original contribution to the interdisciplinary field of law and humanities, Haiyan Lee contends that this image arises from a skewed understanding of China’s political-legal culture, particularly the failure to distinguish what she calls high justice and low justice. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, called in to investigate, finds motives for murder among the clients Venetia has defended, her professional colleagues, her family – even her lover. As Dalgliesh narrows the field of suspects, a second brutal murder draws them into greater complexities of intrigue and evil. Octavia tells Miskin that she and Garry are going birdwatching together. Miskin is honest: she thinks it’s weird that Garry happened to meet Octavia in a bar right after her mother got him acquitted.

Richard Goulding (The Windsors) as Lord Martlesham - he's interviewed by Dalgliesh after his name crops up However, unlike the country house novelists, James also uses her setting for metaphorical purposes. Like Innocent House in Original Sin, the home of a venerable press, the Pawlet Court offices are more than an interesting and useful location for the story. In both novels, the setting represents an institution to which people have devoted their lives, an institution that is seen as being threatened by the machinations of those who have no respect for established values. Aldridge’s declared intention of making Chambers cost-efficient, without any regard for the damage she may do to human lives, represents her thoroughly modern dedication to profit and power, which clearly parallels her amoral attitude toward her own legal practice.

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He is an actor, director and writer of Moroccan-Croatian heritage, known for his roles in All Is Vanity, Quiz and Birthday. A Certain Justice is P.D. James at her strongest. In her first foray into the strange closed world of the Law Courts and the London legal community, she has created a fascinating tale of interwoven passion and terror. As each character leaps into unforgettable life, as each scene draws us forward into new complexities of plot, she proves yet again that no other writer can match her skill in combining the excitement of the classic detective story with the richness of a fine novel. In its subtle portrayal of morality and human behavior, A Certain Justice will stand alongside Devices and Desires and A Taste for Death as one of P.D. James's most important, accomplished and entertaining works.

Four weeks after she's defended Garry Ashe on a charge of murdering his disreputable aunt—in a bravura sequence that provides the most electric opening of any of James's novels—his barrister, brilliant, aloof Venetia Aldridge, is found stabbed to death in her chambers with a paper-knife, a barrister's wig on her head and her corpse soaked in fresh blood. Commander Adam Dalgliesh and his squad naturally suspect Ashe, a plausible sociopath who's improved sufficiently on his acquaintance with Venetia to engage himself to her sadly neglected daughter Octavia Cummins. But Ashe provides an alibi, and Dalgliesh turns to other members of chambers: the retiring head; Venetia's rival to succeed him; the colleague whose jury tampering three years ago Venetia had just discovered; and the doting uncle of that colleague's wife. Under Dalgliesh's patient, tough-minded examination, the junior candidates for tenancy in chambers reveal their own fierce rivalries and fiercely divided motives; so do the clerks, members of the support staff, their families, their ex-spouses, their housemates, until finally a pattern of unspeakable hurt and diabolical revenge begins to emerge. In James's severely Darwinian view of the species, everyone is programmed with memories of traumatic past sufferings, and everyone does whatever it takes to survive. It's left to Dalgliesh and Inspectors Kate Miskin and Piers Tarrant to succor the survivors and count the heavy costs. Even more perfectly than the publishing house in Original Sin (1995), Venetia's law chambers provide James with the ideal arena for her boundlessly compassionate probing of human frailty and for the shivery hope of goodness. (First printing of 250,000; Book-of-the-Month Club selection) A much-needed account of the hierarchy of justice that defines China’s unique political-legal culture. As Hollis and John war with each other, two cops try to solve the case. Sgt. Mitchell believes John to be honorable, while his partner, a dirty cop in the employ of Hollis, attempts to derail the investigation. John recruits his disabled war buddy J. P. to help him in the final confrontation with Hollis. As Hollis is in the midst of violently raping Tanya, Vin intercedes. Before Vin and Hollis can come to blows, John assaults Hollis' house. John kills most of Hollis' henchmen and leaves Vin to die after a knife fight. Although John captures Hollis, reinforcements arrive and turn the tide against him. Both John and J. P. are captured, and Hollis murders J. P. John challenges Hollis to a one-on-one fight, and, when John appears to be winning, Tanya shoots and kills Hollis' remaining henchmen before they can interfere. After John kills Hollis, Mitchell arrives and tells him to leave the scene of the crime, as he will clean it up. The second part of ‘A Certain Justice’ premiered at 9pm on Friday 5th May 2023 on Channel 5 in the UK and is streaming on Acorn TV in the US.

Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination

Miskin recovers the missing paperknife. Dalgliesh questions Carpenter, Caldwell, Langton and Drysdale. Drysdale reveals that Venetia begged him to speak to Octavia, desperate to prevent her engagement to a highly unsuitable suitor. As always, James proves to be a masterful storyteller . . . she remains as intrigued by the mysteries of the human condition as she is by the intricacies of detection.” — The Seattle Post-Intelligencer Dalgliesh, Miskin and Tarrant home in on Janet Carpenter as a suspect: many years ago, Venetia helped acquit a murderer called Anthony Beale who went on to kill Carpenter’s granddaughter. PDJ is so readable in terms of her invention of characters and prose - but her plotting, especially her endings, is not great, and her social commentary is clumsy Tory-speak, almost designed to irritate me: Kate is the poster-girl for pulling herself up by her bootstraps (or whatever that Tory rhetoric is) and making good despite growing up on a council estate but she's still never allowed to feel at home in her upwardly-mobile world and turns down the opportunity to go to university on a police bursary because she predicts feeling out of place: it may or may not limit her career prospects but it certainly keeps her bound in intellectual and ideological terms especially as we see her constantly feeling awkward for not understanding the language of her peers (Piers talking about PPE at Oxford, for example) - you can take the girl out of the council estate but you can't take the council estate out of the girl, the text is telling us rather obnoxiously and patronisingly. It’s now clear that in the wake of her personal tragedies, Janet moved to London to get close to Venetia. Did she hire a hitman to kill her?

Miskin and new recruit Tarrant impart the tragic news to Octavia, who gets defensive. The housekeeper confirms that both she and Garry were home all night. Published in 1994, this is the tenth crime novel featuring Commander Adam Dalgliesh. I am working my way through the Dalgliesh novels and, in my opinion, James could have done with tightening up her work. Her books tend to be over-long and full of detail. That said, this starts really well and, even though it dragged a little, by the end, it was interesting, overall. The actor recently appeared in Netflix’s Enola Holmes while his 115 previous roles also include appearances in Flesh And Blood, Grantchester, Inside No 9, 2017’s Gunpowder, Silent Witness, Snatch, Medici, Tina & Bobby, Rome as well as the films The King’s Speech, Valkyrie, The Bourne Identity and Darkest Hour. David Bamber (Flesh and Blood) as Edgar Froggart - a teacher who knew Venetia's father and has followed her careerKynaston and Dalgliesh deduce that Janet Carpenter’s death is a case of murder disguised as suicide. Froggart tells Dalgliesh he left the employment of Venetia’s father because the man was a sadist who bullied the schoolboys mercilessly. One boy – Marcus Campbell – took his own life because of it. Another winner. . . . In what may be the best of her Dalgliesh series, James creates a gallery of memorable characters and furnishes them with a complex yet convincing story, gracefully told.” — The San Diego Union-Tribune