Cover her face by P.D. James

When a sly and sensuous young woman who had used her body and her brains to climb the social ladder is murdered by someone who had clearly decided that the wages of sin should be death, it falls to Inspector Adam Dalgliesh to find out who the killer is.

Although some individual bits of nice writing, nothing exciting here, especially Inspector Dalgleish.

Rather stolid and but I was intrigued by the structure. I've read her before, but only sporadically over the years, so it'll be interesting to see how her style unfolds.

Sly single mother
smirking at their charity
too pleased with her jokes.

Cover Her Face is a bit of a mess. It seems to belong to a different generation of mystery novels than P.D. James' later novels. It's set in an English country estate with lots of judgmental villagers, not that different than Agatha Christie's Mrs. Marple novels, just without the...uh... charming ethnic stereotypes? (That's sarcasm.)

Adam Dalgleish is a bit of a non-entity, there's none of the depth that comes in into her later novels featuring the character. There's a lot of judgey slut and victim shaming and maybe that's an accurate depiction of village morés, but it's still not that fun to read. And, frankly, the puzzle box plot was not that interesting and I found it extremely tedious to finish.

For completists only, if you are looking to get into P.D. James' novels, I would pick a different starting place.