Death Comes to Pemberley

P. D. James (1920-2014) was born in Oxford and educated at Cambridge High School for Girls. From 1949 to 1968 she worked in the National Health Service and subsequently in the Home Office, first in the Police Department and later in the Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Royal Society of Arts and served as a Governor of the BBC, a member of the Arts Council, where she was Chairman of the Literary Advisory Panel, on the Board of the British Council and as a magistrate in Middlesex and London. She was an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Inner Temple. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and The National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature (US). She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors, stepping down from the post in August 2013.
Tributes to P.D. James (1920- 2014)

From Stephen Page's Tribute to P.D. James , given at the Memorial Service in London
on 29th April, 2015

Phyllis had a long writing career of over fifty years that began surprisingly late. She embarked on Cover Her Face in her mid-thirties. In her autobiography, Time to Be in Earnest , she admitted some regret that she didn't start earlier, saying that 'a streak of indolence . . . made it more agreeable to contemplate the first book rather than actually write it'. Yes, the well-known indolence of P. D. James!
....
Despite a later start she leaves an impressive body of work comprising nineteen brilliant and original novels, and three works of non-fiction, all of which continue to be read throughout the world. To her the choice of detective fiction was simply obvious, but she made it her own and stamped an originality and literary quality

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER"A sparkling curio that will appeal to both Janeites and Jamesites." --"Daily Telegraph"" ""Jane Austen herself would have applauded." --"The Spectator" "A great joint achievement, and a joyous read." --"The Independent"" ""Death Comes to Pemberley is as good as anything P. D. James has written and that is very high praise indeed." --"Sunday Express" "A delight. It reads happily and, as ever in P. D. James's novels, the settings are beautifully and thoroughly imagined, the descriptions and exact. I can't think that it could be better done." --"The Scotsman"" ""Brimming with astute appreciation, inventiveness and narrative zest, Death Comes to Pemberley is an elegantly gauged homage to Austen and an exhilarating tribute to the inexhaustible vitality of James's imagination." --"The Sunday Times" "Of all the other pens to take up where Austen left off, P. D. James's is head and shoulders above the rest." --"Evening Standard"