An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James

And I did not guess the ending.ĭisappointingly, PD James only wrote two Cordelia Gray novels, this in 1972 and The Skull Beneath the Skin ten years later.

The Seventies college setting in Cambridge – student parties, punting on the Cam – felt authentic. This is a satisfying read with plenty of twists, mysteries and unexplained behaviour. Something is evidently not right and Cordelia is soon convinced Mark was murdered. The Marklands, who employed Mark in his last few weeks, are shadows on the edge of the story. Buy a discounted Paperback of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman. Sir Ronald’s assistant/housekeeper is superior and unhelpful. Booktopia has An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, Cordelia Gray Series : Book 1 by P. His friends feign friendliness to Cordelia but dance around her questions. Mark left a stew uncooked and a garden fork stuck in half-dug earth. Employed by a Cambridge scientist, Sir Ronald Callender, to discover why his son Mark dropped out of university and committed suicide soon after, Cordelia takes up lodging in the rundown gardener’s cottage where Mark died. Jamess courageous but vulnerable young detective, Cordelia Gray, in a top-rated puzzle of peril that holds you all the way (The New York Times).

She is not a female private detective in the busybodying, gossiping style of Miss Marple or Agatha Raisin, but a liberated, independent woman who is financially motivated to make a success of her business.

And so the tentacles of ‘the Super’ stretch to Cambridge where Cordelia Gray undertakes her first case. And so begins An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by PD James, with a female private detective who is a long way away from Adam Dalgliesh, James’s famous creation, but who has been trained by an ex-copper who worked for Dalgliesh. When Cordelia Gray’s boss at the Pryde Detective Agency dies, he leaves her the business… and an unregistered gun.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman by P.D. James