A Presumption of Death

Jill Paton Walsh has…given us a Lord Peter story in the true Sayers’ style and tradition - Norma Major - The Week on Thrones, Dominations

A superb job of seamless collaboration. Thrones, Dominations is pure pleasure. - Wall Street Journal ON Thrones, Dominations

An engrossing, intelligent and provocative novel in the guise of a conventional mystery. - Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review

What we have here is a true detective story unambiguously set in the Thirties and written so much in the style of Sayers that the narrative is virtually seamless. We meet familiar friends and old enemies: the dowager duchess, loquacious as usual; the duchess of Denver with her egregious snobbery and disapproval of her new sister-in-law … I didn’t myself believe that the job could satisfactorily be done, but she has proved me wrong. - P. D. James, Observer

Could this be the best book Dorothy L. Sayers never wrote? She has done a splendid job - certain to please the legions of Sayers loyalists as well as readers new to the Wimsey canon … Lord Peter has been made much more human and interesting by marriage… and the story is full of twists and connivance. - Chicago Tribune on THRONES, DOMINATIONS

Miraculously right: catching precisely the tone of the relationship … It comes out splendidly, … a thrilling denouement. - Libby Purves, The Times

Jill Paton Walsh does a fine job of taking the first third of a difficult novel of mores and manners and turning it into a readable mystery. She also answers an unasked question about Lord Peter and Harriet: Yes, dear readers, they have a lot of sex and they like it. - Globe and Mail, Toronto

An admirable page-turner with some fascinating detail - Publishing News

Born in 1937, Jill Paton Walsh was an award-winning British novelist and children’s writer. Her adult novels include Knowledge of Angels, which was shortlisted for the 1994 Booker Prize, and the Imogen Quy Mysteries. She also completed Dorothy L. Sayers’s unfinished Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane series. In 1996, she received the CBE for services to literature. She died in 2020.

Dorothy L. Sayers, the greatest of the golden age detective novelists, was born in Oxford in 1893. She was one of the first women to be awarded a degree by Oxford University and worked as a copywriter in an advertising agency from 1921 to 1932. Her aristocratic detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, became one of the most popular fictional heroes of the twentieth century. Dorothy L. Sayers also became famous for her religious plays, notably The Man Born to Be King, which was broadcast controversially during the war years, but she considered her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy to be her best work. She died in 1957.