The Black Tower

Summary: Dalgliesh, recovering from surgery and a misdiagnosis of cancer, Adam heads to the coast to visit a family friend only to find that he had recently died.

I have almost forced myself to pick up fiction this year. I am unsure why, but I have barely read any fiction. I have been slowly working through a collection of the first six books of the Adam Dalgliesh mystery series, which I purchased years ago. I don't love the series yet, but the most well-known books of the series are still to come, so I have been continuing to read, hoping that the series will engage me like Inspector Gamache or others.

In this book, Adam Dalgliesh is not on duty as a homicide detective. Instead, he is on sick leave and planning to resign once he has recovered. Dalgliesh was the son of a pastor. When he was a child, he knew a pastor who had retired to be the chaplain at an estate where the owner was trying to create a community that could care for disabled people who did not need the full care of a nursing home but could not live independently.

Adam felt some obligation to go to this retired pastor who reached out to him, but he also wanted to get away for his own reasons. By the time he arrives (pre-cell phone era), his friend has died of apparent natural causes and has been buried. There was another death, by apparent suicide, at about the same time. As the poet and book collector, Adam was left his friend's library. So he stays around to organize it and clean. But he is drawn into a community he is unsure he wants to be a part of. And his skills as a detective, which he is not sure he wants to use, seem to be needed.

This is another in the series that I did not love, but I liked it enough to keep going on. I own one more book in the series on Kindle. After that, I will check out some of the books from my library. My goal is to get to at least the 11th book before I decide whether to finish the series. But there are only 14 books in the series. So I probably will finish eventually.

I have been reading this series in order and at this point I am ready to give up. James seems to have run out of ideas and takes her readers' patience for granted.

This one, like the previous two, takes place at a medical institution and has the same undercurrents of misanthropy as her others, especially toward the sick and disabled. Only this time, detective Adam Dalgliesh has checked out—he declares that, based on the evidence, he doubts a murder has taken place, and even if one has, he just doesn't care enough to solve it.

He decides this, I should mention, around page two hundred. That's right, two hundred pages in, the protagonist tells us he doesn't care about the potential murder one way or the other, and you have no choice, after slogging through two hundred pages of characters you can't remember doing nothing much, but to agree with him.

Then, if you do keep reading, you're treated to a similar ending as one of the previous books in the series. It may have been mildly satisfying, had you not been dragged through the rest of the book, desperate for it to be over. But instead you're just happy for it to be done.

I have no idea how James thought apathy would be engaging for readers. To me, it seems obvious. You have to make your readers care about your main character, and therefore you have to make your main character care—about something, about anything! James comes off as someone who believes herself to be a good writer, and her outside interviews support that. But after a few books she comes off as arrogant, and even a bit cruel, and frankly as someone who I would never want working for the NHS. (According to her bio she worked there for many years and I assume that's why so many of her books take place at medical institutions.) This one left me frustrated and disappointed.