I used to read thrillers almost to the exclusion of any other books. If I look back at my reading (I've been keeping track since 1997 of every book I've read) in my early twenties, I was the queen of thriller reading. But somehow from one day to the next, I completely dropped thrillers. No idea why, I just did. I picked up a thriller again last year and was reminded how good a well-constructed thriller can be. Just on the right side of exciting, of tantalisingly easy to solve but you can't really be bothered because you want the writer to do it for you. Enter from the left: PD James' 'A Certain Justice'. Still feeling poorly, I wanted to be taken along a ride, in my beloved London, where I would know where I was without ever having actually been to some of the locations in the book. A thrilling ride, to keep my mind of my sniffling, sneezing and coughing. But not too exhausting, I didn't have the stamina to think too much. An intellectual ride, an intelligent one, but not overbearing. Take me into a different world, yet not completely unlike my own. 'A Certain Justice' delivered all that. Cleverly written, engaging, unputdownable.
This quote struck me in particular (connected to a project I'm working on for my degree on identity, location and psychogeography):
The family moved to London. Perhaps, she thought, her father, like so many before him, had seen the great city as an urban jungle where loneliness at least walked with the safety of anonimity, where no questions were asked unless invited, and where the predators had more satisfying prey than a disgraced schoolmaster. (p. 46)
The official PD James website is
here, the wikipedia page
here, and the Penguin Celebrations page
here.