Redheaded Reviews: Death of an Expert Witness by P.D. James

Written in 1977, this book opens up with the murder of a young woman that the local coroner, Kerrison is sneaking out of his house to go to to pronounce that she is a murder victim. He doesn't want his teenage daughter or young son to hear him leave and worry. His daughter does anyway and gets up looks in on her brother something the live-in housekeeper Miss Willard never does. Dr. Kerrison is in a custody battle with his soon to be ex-wife who left him and his children for a colleague at his old job. Nell, the daughter expresses a hatred over a Dr. Lorrimer who heads up the biology department of the forensic science building named Hoggath after Dr. Hoggath who started it--the first one in all of England way out in the fens in East Anglia also known as the middle of nowhere.

Pretty soon, we meet Dr. Howath, the head of the lab who also hates Dr. Lorrimer for dating his half-sister, though she has since ended it. His feelings for his sister are complicated. They live together since the death of her husband in an auto accident. He wishes he were dead too. Oh, and Dr. Howarth got the job of head of the department over Dr. Lorrimer. Then there's Dr. Lormier's cousin Miss Angela Foley who works as Dr. Howarth's secretary who needs four thousand pounds to buy the house she's renting because the owner has decided to sell it and she and her girlfriend Sarah Mawson who is a novelist, but while a well-reviewed one, not a profitable one, don't want to move. When Lorrimer and Foley's grandmother died she refused to leave any of her 30,000 pounds to Foley because she was a girl. Lorrimer promised to leave the money to her in his will. But after his love affair with Domenica Schoefield, Dr. Howarth's sister he still believes that he can win her back and convince her to marry him so he changes his will to leave everything to set up a scholarship and 1,000 pounds to the young receptionist who works the desk, Barbara Pridmore whom he was encouraging to take her 'A' levels and pursue a career in science. Barbara was the only person who actually liked Dr. Lorrimier. No one knows that he's changed his will yet.

Then there was Dr. Middlemas, the documents expert who was asked by Clifford Bradley's wife to help out with Dr. Lorrimer who was putting down Bradley and giving him poor reviews. Dr. Lorrimer would make Dr. Bradley nervous and dejected by doing his results over constantly and being cold and hard to him. Dr. Lorrimer was harder on him because Bradley had just gotten promoted and Lorrimer believed he shouldn't be in the lab at all. Dr. Middlemas had a wife with a cousin who committed suicide over the working conditions Dr. Lorrimer put him under that caused him to lose his fiancee. Dr. Middlemas will be damned if he will let this happen again and the two get involved in fisticuffs resulting in Dr. Lorrimer having a busted nose and Dr. Middlemas having blood on his lab coat.

Of course, Dr. Lorrimer is found dead inside the lab with his head bashed in and Commander Dalgliesh is called in to investigate from London. He's working with Inspector Massingham again with this one. An interesting tidbit is that there is a gay couple as characters in a novel written by a prominent writer at this time period. Of course, no one in the book likes them and it's not necessarily because they're gay it's because of various other reasons. But when you're with them you can't help but like them and hope they get to keep the house. It hardly seems fair to pick on them for what seems to be their gayness. Dr. Lorrimer won't be the only murder in this book. Someone else will be murdered as well and this person won't be as well hated. This book just didn't grab me the way the others have and I really didn't like the way Foley and Mawson were treated. But it picked up toward the end and became a real page turner after the second body was found. I give it four out of five stars.

Quotes

Look, mate, if you can’t make it in bed, if she isn’t finding you quite up to the mark, don’t take your frustration out on the rest of us. Remember Chesterfield’s advice. The expense is exorbitant, the position ridiculous, and the pleasure transitory.

-P.D. James (Death of an Expert Witness p 53)

Death obliterates family resemblance as it does personality; there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

-P.D. James (Death of an Expert Witness p 149)

Sex no longer had the power to shock him; love, he decided, obviously could.

-P.D. James (Death of an Expert Witness p 160)

“But he wasn’t asking for a commercial arrangement,” said Dalglisesh. “He was asking for love.” “That’s something I didn’t have to give, and he had no right to expect.” None of us, thought Dalgliesh, has a right to expect it. But we do.

-P.D. James (Death of an Expert Witness p 181)

The trouble with a religious education, if you’re a pagan like me, is that you’re left all your life feeling that you’ve lost something, not that it isn’t there.

-P.D. James (Death of an Expert Witness p 191)

They’ll tell you the most destructive force in the world is hate. Don’t you believe it, lad. It’s love.

-P.D. James (Death of an Expert Witness p 208)