Inspector Adam Dalgliesh is many mystery readers’ favourite fictional detective. The thoughtful and introspective Scotland Yard inspector, who is a poet at heart, is championed as one of the all-time great literary detectives.

Fans of P.D. James often point to her exceptional writing, believable characters, and well-constructed plots as reasons why they frequently revisit her books. She is credited with modernising traditional British detective fiction with character-driven stories that are thoughtful, clever, and unsettling. She herself took the genre seriously, saying, “It’s perfectly possible to remain within the constraints and conventions of the genre and be a serious writer, saying something true about men and women and their relationships and the society in which they live.”

We recommend reading the books in order, as Dalgliesh personally grows and changes over the course of the series, and events in earlier books have an impact on him. That said, each novel has a standalone mystery, so following the story without prior background on the characters is not an issue.