The Mistletoe Murder

Throughout her illustrious career as the Queen of Crime, P. D. James was frequently commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write a special short story for Christmas. Four of the best are collected here.

Each of these stories is as playful as it is ingeniously plotted, the author's sly humor as evident as her hallmark narrative elegance and shrewd understanding of some of the most complex—not to say the most damning—aspects of human nature.

In "The Twelve Clues of Christmas," James's iconic Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh is drawn into a case that is, in his own words, "pure Agatha Christie." In "A Very Commonplace Murder," a respectable clerk's secret taste for pornography is only the first reason he finds for not coming forward as a witness to a terrible crime. "The Boxdale Inheritance" finds Dalgliesh's godfather imploring him to reinvestigate a notorious murder that might ease the godfather's mind about an inheritance—but which will reveal a truth that even the supremely upstanding Dalgliesh will keep to himself. And, in the title story, a bestselling crime novelist describes the crime she herself was involved in fifty years earlier.

A treat for P. D. James's legions of fans and anyone who enjoys the pleasures of a masterfully wrought whodunit.