Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh is trying to forget a very straining investigation and is struggling with self-doubt and fear of commitment in his relationship with girlfriend Deborah Riscoe. Therefore, he decides to spend a ten-day holiday away from it all, with his beloved spinster aunt Jane Dalgliesh, in her cottage in Suffolk…

If Dalgliesh hoped to find an answer to his questions and a quiet holiday watching birds with his aunt, he is soon disillusioned. Just after his arrival, several neighbors, all people connected to each other by their love of literature (they are either writers themselves or critics) gather at Jane Dalgliesh’s cottage: they want Dalgliesh’s opinion on a very puzzling mystery. Maurice Seton, a famous mystery writer, has disappeared. He hasn’t been seen for two days in the London Club where he was staying. Even more baffling is the fact that he has sent, as he usually does when away, his typed work to his secretary. But she is adamant that this latest manuscript cannot be his own work. As they discuss the writer’s disappearance, the police call: Maurice Seton has been found dead in a small dinghy, both hands chopped…

Suspicion bordering on paranoia soon creeps upon the small community of writers: who could kill Maurice Seton in a manner which has been dropped as a hint for one of his novels by fellow romance writer Celia Calthrop? Inspector Reckless is dispatched on the case. Immediately, a natural antipathy arises between him and Dalgliesh, reinforced by the fact that Reckless suspects Jane Dalgliesh herself. However, Reckless will include Dalgliesh in the investigation since he has valuable information on the suspects whom he has known, however remotely, for years…

Death in Holy Orders  #11    20 hours      unabridged     Charles Keating

Commander Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard agrees to investigate the questionable death of Ronald Treeves, an ordinand at St. Anselm's College and the son of Sir Alred Treeves, a man used to having his own way. Although Ronald's death is viewed as a suicide by most of the college, Dalgliesh's investigation begins to raise some doubt. St. Anselm's is situated on the crumbling coast line of East Anglia, and, like that coast, it, too, is having difficulty standing up to the onslaught of the 20th century. However, when Archdeacon Crampton, one of St. Anselm's most vocal opponents, is found murdered in the chapel, Dalgliesh has more than one mystery to solve.

The Dupayne, a small private museum in London devoted to the interwar years 1919 -- 1939, is in turmoil. As its trustees argue over whether it should be closed, one of them is brutally and mysteriously murdered. Yet even as Commander Dalgliesh and his team proceed with their investigation, a second corpse is discovered. Someone in the Dupayne is prepared to kill and kill again. Still more sinister, the murders appear to echo the notorious crimes of the past featured in one of the museum’s galleries: the Murder Room.

Combe Island off the Cornish coast is a restful haven for the elite. But when one of its distinguished visitors is found hanging from the island’s famous lighthouse in what appears to have been a murder, the peace is shattered. Commander Adam Dalgliesh is called in to handle the sensitive case, but at a difficult time for him and his depleted team. He is uncertain about his future with his girlfriend Emma Lavenham; his principle detective Kate Miskin is going through an emotional crisis; and the ambitious Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith is not happy about having a female boss. After a second brutal killing, the whole investigation is jeopardized, and Dalgliesh is faced with a danger even more insidious than murder.