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.