This book was P.D. James' debut novel in which she introduced her erudite Scotland Yard detective Adam Dalgliesh. I had read several of her later novels featuring this character, so I was looking forward to seeing how she began with him, and I wasn't disappointed.
Sally Jupp is a beautiful, headstrong young woman. She has been living in a home for unwed mothers, and when her baby is a few months old, she is placed as a housemaid and nurse's assistant in a household where the invalid patriarch is dying. The night she abruptly announces her engagement to the family's heir is the night she is rudely put in her place--strangled in her bed behind a bolted door. Dalgliesh brilliantly finds her killer among a whole houseful of suspects, almost all of whom had reason to wish her dead.
The picture was an advertisement in an interior design magazine, and I doubt that her room was as nice as this one, but since it had the requisite entry window and cup of cocoa, it just begged to be the scene of her demise. I scuffed it a bit with very fine sandpaper to age it. The title is written on a small piece of Canson Vidalon vellum. I used Scotch Vellum tape to attach it, and it really doesn't show through. The picture was cut at the edge of the crown molding, so the ceiling is actually the acrylic painted page. It is difficult to see, but if you click on it for an enlarged view, you will be able to just make out that I went over the chain of the birdcage with a gold gel pen, extending it to a hook in the "ceiling."
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