Death Comes to Pemberley

This was just terrible. How terrible? Let me count the ways (POTENTIAL SPOILERS):

1. Why write a follow-up to Pride and Prejudice if you seemingly make little effort to capture the essential essence of the primary characters?

2. Why write a follow-up to Pride and Prejudice that turns Elizabeth into a simpering, boring, obedient little wifey-poo and Darcy into a complete uptight prig (granted, he always kind of was but he was also charming and there is none of that here)?

3. Why write a follow-up to Pride and Prejudice that is a murder mystery and make it SO INCREDIBLY DUMB AND BORING that the reader can barely bring herself to care?

4. Why write a follow-up to Pride and Prejudice that is a murder mystery and include plot holes so big you show more could drive a chaise-and-four through them? Why didn't anyone bother asking Lydia what Wickham and Denny were arguing about?!?!?!

5. Why write anything if you are basically just going to phone it in and tell your story completely through terribly awkward exposition and long speeches?

6. .... I can't go on. I don't know why I bothered to finish this except that maybe because it was on audio. Had it been a "real" book, I am fairly confident I would have just skipped to the last few pages to see whodunnit. Oh, except that would have told me nothing because we learn whodunnit well before the end of the book, after which time, Ms. James just goes on and on about nothing at all and won't let her crappy story die. I wanted to stab myself in the ears by the end of it.

So, yeah, not recommended. show less

I went into *Death Comes to Pemberley* wanting to love it. P. D. James is one of my favorite writers, and I trust her completely when it comes to structure, character, and moral complexity.

But at its core, this is still a continuation of *Pride and Prejudice*, and that underlying world simply does not work for me.

Because I haven’t read Austen, I can’t judge how accurate the continuation is—but knowing James, I assume it’s handled with care and precision. The issue isn’t execution. It’s the framework itself.

The novel operates within a very formal moral system where behavior, reputation, and social rules dominate every interaction. Characters act according to expectation rather than internal truth, and emotional expression show more feels constrained by etiquette. I found this frustrating rather than engaging.

Even with a murder at the center, the story never fully escapes that controlled environment. Instead of tension, I felt distance. Instead of psychological depth, I felt social performance.

This isn’t a flaw in the writing—it’s a mismatch in taste. Readers who enjoy Austen’s world and its codes of behavior will likely appreciate what James does here. For me, the structure itself creates a barrier I couldn’t get past. show less

P.D. James is one of the great mystery writers. Her books are psychologically dark and dense, humanely subtle and complex. Long before I started reviewing and writing books, she was the author I had to read each time she published a new book.

Her latest takes a decidedly different direction. Instead of contemporary England, she has set this one at Pemberley estate in 1803, six years after Miss Elizabeth Bennet has married Darcy. That is, P.D. James takes the prose of Jane Austen as her setting.

P.D. James has an excellent ear. When she writes in Austen’s mode, she does so with incredible exactitude. The tone and diction sound as if lifted from the pages of Pride and Prejudice. While I fully recognize the torture I inflicted on teenage show more boys by requiring them to read Pride and Prejudice when I taught high school English, some of us in the world adore Austen. There is something of a cottage industry of imitators of Austen these days. I’ve avoided most of them for one reason or another, mostly time shortage. But when a master like P.D. James joined the cause, I bit. She didn’t disappoint me.

James goes beyond skillful imitation (which would be challenging enough in and of itself), but the hybrid she creates feels at times like strange bedfellows. Even P.D. James admits in her author’s note that death and murder are not the stuff of Austen. James’s customary darkness never feels to me quite at home with the light if cynical tone that Austen strikes even in her most tragic moments. A Picasso set next to a Vermeer are both still delightful to examine, and the juxtaposition can actually illuminate both. Reading Death Comes to Pemberley was a bit like that, two masters at work, but on separate projects that somehow got jumbled together at the publishers. One minute James has you lost in Austen’s language and worldview. The next she’s bent over a bloody corpse or elaborating on police procedures at the opening of the 19th century—not Austen-like at all. One other smaller note: Of such elaborations on various background topics, there were perhaps too many and they were not organically integrated into the flow of the tale. Austen never needs to go into such exegesis, but we understand her world without difficulty. I think James could have trusted us to do without some of this information.

I enjoyed this book, and I recommend it if you happen to love both P.D. James and Austen, but be aware of the disjuncture you may sometimes languish in. Watching a master at work is engaging, especially when she tries something audacious and remarkable. It doesn’t have to be completely successful to be worth the attempt. show less

SO disappointing! I've deliberately been avoiding reading the many, many new authors who have picked up Jane Austen's characters and launched them into new adventures. Why? Because it's NOT the characters (at least not taken on their own strength) that make Jane Austen novels so memorable, it's Austen's storytelling prowess and subtle wit - which, if they were so easy to duplicate/imitate, would scarcely explain why the author remains so admired today. However, I was tempted into setting aside my misgivings by the prospect of an Austen mystery written by an author with proven mystery chops. Maybe, I thought, the diversion of a good mystery plot would distract my attention from any potential lapses in technique or wit.

The story picks up show more six years after the marriage of Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy, whose highly-entertaining courtship is described in Pride & Prejudice. The plot revolves around Lydia's rogue of a husband, Wickham, who finds himself accused of murder after being present (albeit hopelessly drunk) at the bludgeoning death of a fellow soldier on the Pemberley estate.

Alas, the mystery plot never becomes remotely interesting, which caused me to shift my focus to the storytelling, which doesn't stand up to scrutiny either. I simply don't understand how a writer as competent as James could have committed so many basic storytelling errors: abandoning a major character (Lydia) half-way through the novel; creating a mystery with a resolution that is revealed not through investigation or cleverness but through improbable chance/coincidence; retelling items of plot over and over again (first we hear the info from Elizabeth, then she retells the tale to Jane, then the whole tale gets repeated AGAIN at the inquest ... sheesh!); and, finally, wrapping up the novel with an epilogue that unnecessarily rehashes an episode from Pride & Prejudice that was satisfactorily resolved in the original text and certainly in no need of rehashing here.

Also didn't appreciate inconsistencies in characterization (where has Elizabeth's sardonic wit disappeared to? where has Darcy's haughtiness gone?) or James' attempt to "update" Austen's storytelling by having her characters explicitly discuss their feelings/emotions rather than leaving it to us readers to infer them. This sequel doesn't begin to live up to the subtlety or wit of Austen's original text.

In short, I've learned my lesson: there's only one Jane Austen, and she died in 1817. In future I'll be more disciplined about giving these Austen pastiches a miss. show less

Some years after [b:Pride and Prejudice|1885|Pride and Prejudice|Jane Austen|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1320399351s/1885.jpg|3060926], Lydia Wickham (nee Bennet) stumbles through the front door of Pemberley in hysterics. There were gunshots in the woods, and she's sure her husband has been murdered. Darcy and some of the other men go out in search, and find Mr. Wickham crouched over Denny's body. He is covered in blood and, upon seeing them, says he killed his friend. Darcy summons the magistrate and then spends the entire rest of the novel thinking anachronistic thoughts and doing absolutely nothing related to the murder investigation. In fact, there really isn't a murder investigation; the most the characters do in regards to show more the murder is sit around the fire talking about whether or not the alleged murderer has the mindset possible to do the deed. No evidence turns up, nor do the characters make any attempt to find any. The full story of the murder is randomly turned up in a deathbed confession, and then another character equally randomly confesses the rest of the plot.

It's a very odd book. Usually a murder mystery involves a long period of finding out clues, or talking to witnesses, or figuring out the motives--and instead the characters just go over the same three facts ad nauseum. For example: we see the discovery of the body through Mr. Darcy's eyes, and then he relives the discovery a few times, and then he recounts the discovery several times to various law enforcement personnel. His story and view of the facts never change, so there's no point to going over it all again almost word-for-word.

It's no good as historical fiction, because although James has clearly done some research into the period (which she infodumps randomly; for example, apropos of nothing, Darcy soapboxes about the need for an appeals court) she doesn't seem to get the underpinnings of Regency society. The characters are worried that they might upset the police by moving the body--even though they would have no reason to expect an autopsy, and the police of the time were a distrustred force of ill-trained, ill-paid, low class dudes who barely existed yet. And even a century later the police wouldn't be going in the front door, let alone questioning rich gentlemen about their alibis in the parlor!

And it doesn't work as a continuation of Pride and Prejudice, either. The spirit and wit of Austen is completely missing, but then I expected that. But the characters are all wrong as well! Elizabeth is a quiet, maternal figure in the background, who has about three scenes total. She and Mr.Darcy hardly speak to each other, except to utter platitudes about how happy they are to have children or to rehash old lines from P&P. Colonel Fitzwilliam gets a complete character assassination--far from the wry, practical man who bantered with Lizzy, here he's a prig who despises her. It doesn't ring true.

[b:Death Comes to Pemberley|12875355|Death Comes to Pemberley|P.D. James|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1318936579s/12875355.jpg|17822238] just doesn't satisfy on any level. If you're looking for murder mysteries set in the Regency period, I suggest the Julian Kestral series by Kate Ross instead.


(The review I used to have up, before I read the book, was "Ooh, I hope Wickham's been murdered! That child-molesting, predatory lying scumbag.") show less

Disappointing. There's hardly any mystery here, and no detecting of any kind--what questions there are about the crime are answered entirely through the actions and confessions of those involved. James handles the tone and style of a novel inspired by Jane Austen reasonably well, but the characterization of familiar faces is sometimes competent and other times way off the mark (this, of course, is surely a matter purely of individual taste). The plot seems to plod, with little compelling one to discover what will happen. Information is clumsily repeated, and the book's epilogue takes a good deal of the vim out of Pride and Prejudice by explaining away some of the character peculiarities with which one is still left at the close of that show more novel. (This was very likely an attempt at answering questions and "filling in" missing bits from the source material, which is an appropriate and often very compelling function of retellings, but it fell flat here.) Aside from the general competency at capturing the Regency feel, the early chapters about day-to-day life for Mr. and Mrs. Darcy (and to a lesser extent Mr. and Mrs. Bingley) are the aspects of the novel that would best recommend it. show less

When I read Death Comes to Pemberly in 2013, I must confess I and was not all that engaged. This time is different. I've been so immersed in the regency era for the last year that I am rather awed by James' attention to . . . well . . . everything. Language and atmosphere (a long-windedness we can barely tolerate anymore), details of rank and consequence, of custom, and all the little details of furnishings. James is aware of the slower pace and she even jokes about it describing one of the magistrates who proses on endlessly but would disappoint others if he did not. Different world. Interestingly the story takes place during the little lull in fighting Napoleon, the Treaty of Amiens although hints abound that military men are show more expecting to get back to soldiering. That is so various characters can be present, including poor Captain Denny.

At the same time, the care James took to write authentically led at times to a ponderous feel. I wouldn't attempt write a regency novel that strives to be so authentic because the reading audience wouldn't tolerate it(as I did not the first time around, nor could I do what James did so well.) Once I allowed myself to read it slowly, savouring James' efforts I began to hugely enjoy the book. ****1/2 show less