Sleep No More
Six Murderous Tales
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4.0 • 27 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
No one gets inside the head of the murderer—or makes it a more thrilling read—than the late, great P. D. James. Fast on the heels of her latest best seller: a new, fiendishly entertaining gathering of previously uncollected stories, from the author of Death Comes to Pemberley and The Private Patient.
It's not always a question of "whodunit?" Sometimes there's more mystery in the why or how. And although we usually know the unhealthy fates of both victim and perpetrator, what of those clever few who plan and carry out the perfect crime? The ones who aren't brought down even though they're found out? And what about those who do the finding out who witness a murder or who identify the murderer but keep the information to themselves? These are some of the mysteries that we follow through those six stories as we are drawn into the thinking, the memories, the emotional machinations, the rationalizations, the dreams and desires behind murderous cause and effect.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The selections in this solid second posthumous collection from MWA Grand Master James (after 2016's The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories) explore variations of the theme of looking back on past violent incidents. In "The Yo-Yo," a yo-yo that a septuagenarian played with as a child sparks memories of a murder that occurred while he was in prep school; the tale ends with an ironic twist. In "The Murder of Santa Claus," the recollections of writer Charles Mickledore the creator of an aristocratic sleuth dismissed by critics as "a pallid copy of Peter Wimsey" about a long-ago murder case alternate with those of elderly Det. Insp. John Pottinger. James pokes fun at herself when Mickledore remarks, "I'm no H.R.F. Keating, no Dick Francis, not even a P.D. James." The standout is "The Victim," in which the cuckolded first husband of Princess Ilsa Mancelli, who was a film and TV star before marrying into royalty, plots revenge. James (1920 2014) was just as gifted an author of short stories as she was a novelist.)
