Award-winning P.D. James, one of the masters of crime fiction, takes her best-known detective to the Dorset coast in this murder mystery. Awakening on his sick bed to a deepening sense of his own mortality, Dalgliesh fights with his illness and finds himself embroiled in a thrilling murder investigation packed with lies, suspicion and deceit.Commander Dalgliesh is recuperating from a life-threatening illness when he receives a call for advice from an elderly friend who works as a chaplain in a home for the disabled on the Dorset coast. Dalgliesh arrives to discover that Father Baddeley has recently and mysteriously died, as has one of the patients at Toynton Grange. Evidently the home is not quite the caring community it purports to be. Dalgliesh is determined to discover the truth of his friend's death, but further fatalities follow and his own life is in danger as he unmasks the evil at the heart of Toynton Grange.From the bestselling author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Children of Men and The Murder Room, comes the fifth novel in the Adam Dalgliesh series, a thrilling work of crime fiction that explores the mysterious and intense emotions responsible for the unique crime of murder, with authority and sensitivity. Set on the Dorset coast, The Black Tower possesses all of the qualities which distinguish P.D. James as a novelist.This novel won the Silver Dagger award for crime fiction and was adapted into a television program in 1985 starring actors such as Roy Marsden, Pauline Collins and Martin Jarvis.

P. D. James is a bestselling and internationally acclaimed crime writer. She is the creator of Adam Dalgliesh and Cordelia Gray, and their long and successful series of mysteries. Her works include Cover Her Face (1962), An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), Innocent Blood (1980), Children of Men (1992), and the Jane Austen-inspired Death Comes to Pemberley (2011).James was born in Oxford in 1920. She has won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award. She has received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991. In 1997 she was elected President of the Society of Authors. She lives in London and Oxford and has two daughters, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.