P. D. James has been writing extremely popular, highly praised crime novels for more than forty years, and Penguin is proud to publish them in paperback. Her most famous and enduring creation is the poet-detective Adam Dalgliesh, and in Innocent House - taken from Original Sin - he is confronted with a suspicious death and a puzzle at a respected publishing house.

The stink rolled out to meet them like an evil wraith, the familiar human smell of vomit, not strong but so unexpected that Mandy instinctively recoiled. Over Miss Etienne's shoulder her eyes took in at once a small room with an uncarpeted wooden floor, a square table to the right of the door and a single high window. Under the window was a divan bed and on the bed sprawled a woman.

It had needed no smell to tell Mandy she was looking at death. She didn't scream; she had never screamed from fear or shock; but a giant fist mailed in ice clutched and squeezed her heart and stomach and she began shivering as violently as a child lifted from an icy sea. Neither of them spoke but, with Mandy close behind Miss Etienne, they moved with quiet almost imperceptible steps closer to the bed.

She was lying on top of a tartan rug but had taken the single pillow from beneath it to rest her head as if needing this final comfort even in the last moments of consciousness. By the bed stood a chair holding an empty wine bottle, a stained tumbler and a large screw-top jar. Beneath it a pair of brown laced shoes had been laid neatly side by side. Perhaps, thought Mandy, she had taken them off because she hadn't wanted to soil the rug. But the rug was soiled and so was the pillow. There was a slime of vomit like the track of a giant snail gummed to the left cheek and stiffening the pillow. The woman's eyes were half open, the irises turned upwards, her grey hair, worn in a fringe, was hardly disarranged. She was wearing a high-necked jumper and a tweed skirt from which two skinny legs, oddly twisted, stuck out like sticks. Her left arm was flung outwards, almost touching the chair, the right lay across her breast. The right hand had scrabbled at the thin wool of the jumper before death, drawing it up to reveal a few inches of white vest. Beside the empty pill bottle there was a square envelope addressed in strong black handwriting.

Mandy whispered as reverently as if she were in church: 'Who is she?'

Miss Etienne's voice was calm. 'Sonia Clements. One of our senior editors.'

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