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Cover Her Face is P. D. James's electric debut novel, an ingeniously plotted mystery that immediately placed her among the masters of suspense.
250 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1962
Cover her face. Mine eyes dazzle; she died young. - John Webster (1580-1634), from The Duchess of Malfi (1614)
Dalgliesh pondered on the diversity of the clues which he felt were salient in the case. There was Martha’s significant reluctance to dwell on one of Sally’s shortcomings. There was the bottle of Sommeil pressed hastily into the earth. There was an empty cocoa tin, a golden-haired girl laughing up at Stephen Maxie as he retrieved a child’s balloon from a Martingale elm, an anonymous telephone call and a gloved hand briefly glimpsed as it closed the trap-door into Bocock's loft. And at the heart of the mystery, the clue that would make all plain, lay the complex personality of Sally Jupp. - Chief Detective Inspector Dalgliesh ponders the clues in Cover Her Face.I decided to include P.D. James' (1920-2014) Adam Dalgliesh novels as one of my re-read binges due to the fortuitous discovery of several of the early paperbacks while I was emptying a storage locker. This went together with the discovery that there was a rebooted TV-series adapting the novels as well, which began in 2021.