A review by bigskyreader
Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James

1.0

One star for PD James seems inherently wrong, but this just wasn't her best book. If you're going to take on Jane Austen's most famous characters and make them the stars of your own book, you better make it magnificent, and frankly, this was disappointing. I'm not against a pastiche per se - I quite enjoyed Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (though to be fair, that was mostly Austen's original wording except for the zombies). But James manages to take Darcy and Elizabeth and suck the life out of them. Characters spoke and behaved in ways that weren't consistent with the originals. In fact, though the whodunnit part wasn't hard to figure out, I was really rooting for the formerly charming Colonel Fitzwilliam to be the bad guy from the start, just because he was now heavy-handed and censorious. Overall, it was dull and plodding, which explains why it took me two months to get through it.