Mystery story that kept my interest; not life-changing. ( )

Not as good as Death in Holy Orders, but still one of the good Dalgleish novels. ( )

In these early novels, the cases we see Dalgliesh solve are ones he stumbles into while trying to be on vacation. Like Unnatural Causes and Devices and Desires, Adam is trying to get some space and murder just follows him wherever he goes. This time is a weird cloister like place that is a home for handicapped youths. He goes there because the priest who died wrote asking him to come. By the time Adam arrives, he is already dead. Some weird things surface & Adam thinks the death may not be entirely natural.

As time passes, more deaths occur. One is meant too look natural, another like a suicide. This is 4 deaths in the same little community. The first occurred before Adam arrived also, a patient accidentally fell off a cliff when his wheelchair brakes gave out. Or did he? He is the supposed monster of a man described in the synopsis, but really he was just a jerk made worse by his condition.

I had to think that the totally healthy guy who hung around this place for kicks was somehow involved. I mean if you’re a young, semi-wealthy person in the 1970s, you don’t hand out with sick, invalids because you have nothing better to do. Turns out that he and a partner were smuggling drugs in the patient’s wheelchairs whenever they went for their pilgrimage to Lourdes. It was kind of a stretch though since the amount of drugs was so small. Hard to believe that either partner could have made enough money off the stuff. The killings were to prevent those people who had found out, from telling.

While not as good as her Innocent Blood (1980) or the fantastic Children of Men (2006), The Black Tower is a page-turner with complex, fascinating characters. A slew of murders, all of which appear to be natural deaths, almost defeat the recuperating Adam Dalgliesh, who has determined to give up criminal justice following a life-threatening illness. The parallels between Dalgliesh's recovery and the lives of the patients at the nursing home that the detective is visiting in response to a request from an old friend put The Black Tower beyond the typical whodonit. The wrap-up at the end is a little quick, however, with too much explanation from both Dalgliesh and the murdered. ( )

This book may have been entirely too English for me to follow. The setup was really good - Dalgliesh receives a letter from his old prelate asking him to visit, then finds him dead when he does - and then come a series of really inexplicable scenes and characters. One character whom is described on the back as a vamp seems to be not particularly sexy, and it's never quite clear to me why many of the characters are living near this asylum, or why anyone would build a black tower out on the headland in the first place. What it came down to is that I never had any clue of what was going on until the end, which was funny, because the ending really wraps everything up neatly. All is explained, all is clear, and it all makes sense.

Maybe it's just that the middle part of the book goes so over-the-top on English eccentricism that an American thirty years later can't make sense of it. I would love to see how James would handle writing the same book again today. ( )