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A review by carweneve
Death Comes to Pemberley by P.D. James
3.0
It was a nice easy read, and a fun follow up to Pride and Prejudice, but I did feel it could have been better.
Lots of the detail felt clunky and forced in (e.g. details of Mary and Kitty and the pulling in of characters from other Austen book - I also found it unrealistic that Kitty, by this point 25-ish would still be unmarried as she was always described as out-going and by no means ugly, even just staying in Meryton she would almost certainly have married, without any additional society Jane and Elizabeth could have provided), but what particularly jarred with me were the descriptions of the legal system, especially the mini-rant about the European Court of Human Rights ("That would be the ultimate idiocy, and if carried on ad infinitum could presumably result in a foreign court trying English cases. And that would be the end of more than our legal system.") Okay, we get it PD James, you don't like the ECHR, but seriously, this is not something any lawyer in the early 19th century would ever have even thought of.
The discussion about the trial procedure felt more like the author was worried people would criticise her for getting it wrong otherwise, because it is different now, but it was totally unnecessary. If I had even noticed while reading that procedure was different, I would either have been "meh, whatever, good story" or assumed things were different then, I would not have gasped in indignation at the author's shocking lack of research into the early 19th century legal system. The whole chapter felt like a legal history course and didn't add anything to the story.
So, in short, if PD James hadn't felt the need to pull in as many Austen characters as possible or to provide a history/politics lesson for us all, I would have given it 4-stars as a fun easy read, but the distractions pushed it down a star for me.
Lots of the detail felt clunky and forced in (e.g. details of Mary and Kitty and the pulling in of characters from other Austen book - I also found it unrealistic that Kitty, by this point 25-ish would still be unmarried as she was always described as out-going and by no means ugly, even just staying in Meryton she would almost certainly have married, without any additional society Jane and Elizabeth could have provided), but what particularly jarred with me were the descriptions of the legal system, especially the mini-rant about the European Court of Human Rights ("That would be the ultimate idiocy, and if carried on ad infinitum could presumably result in a foreign court trying English cases. And that would be the end of more than our legal system.") Okay, we get it PD James, you don't like the ECHR, but seriously, this is not something any lawyer in the early 19th century would ever have even thought of.
The discussion about the trial procedure felt more like the author was worried people would criticise her for getting it wrong otherwise, because it is different now, but it was totally unnecessary. If I had even noticed while reading that procedure was different, I would either have been "meh, whatever, good story" or assumed things were different then, I would not have gasped in indignation at the author's shocking lack of research into the early 19th century legal system. The whole chapter felt like a legal history course and didn't add anything to the story.
So, in short, if PD James hadn't felt the need to pull in as many Austen characters as possible or to provide a history/politics lesson for us all, I would have given it 4-stars as a fun easy read, but the distractions pushed it down a star for me.