Rhoda Gradwyn is an investigative reporter notorious for ferreting out celebrity secrets. Her best weapon: the scar that runs like a "puckered crevice" down her left cheek, ensuring nobody's gaze lingers on her long.
Now 47, she's decided it's time for cosmetic surgery and checks into a private clinic in a Tudor manor house in the Dorset countryside to get the scar removed. Hours after a successful operation, she's found strangled in her bed.
PD James's brawny new novel, The Private Patient, blends a classic mystery with an astute portrait of contemporary Britain, a place where class continues to trump wealth and education. It also meditates on the nature of murder itself, the "terrible iconoclastic crime" that fascinates even as it appalls.
Commander Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard, back for his 14th novel, is on the case. Tall, taciturn and widowed at a young age, the priest's son and published poet is one of literature's most intellectual sleuths. Though his standoffishness is as much his trademark as his Jaguar, he's now on the verge of remarrying and is considering quitting the force.
From the outset, he's convinced one of the manor's residents is the killer. These are the usual suspects: a surly maid, a timorous cook and a rustic gardener obsessed with gruesome local legends.
Suspicion also falls on the assistant surgeon and his sister, their cousin and the housekeeper, whose family owned the manor before being forced to sell it.
James is a legendary cerebral mystery writer, packing her novels with philosophical musings on life and death, drawing on literary quotations that are often – though not always – consoling.
But even as her measured prose blurs the distinction between literary and crime fiction, she hews to the genre's rules. The plot is satisfyingly intricate, thickening to include two more corpses along with family feuds, deadly childhood jealousy and plagiarism. The pace rarely slackens despite a meticulous attention to detail that clocks everything from the contents of a room to the quality of silence in a city.
And though her murder scenes may seem pallid by today's grisly standards, they still chill. The murderer, for instance, appears as a spectre with a "pinkly pale" hand, an image recalling the prose of another James, Victorian ghost-story writer MR James.
The novel explores the limitations of change, both for individuals like Rhoda and for the nation as a whole.
Societal change is acknowledged through a series of subtle asides on topics including the politicisation of the police to the cheapening of our definition of love. "All friendships seem to be defined now in terms of sexuality," says one character, who professes to a kind of love that the police wouldn't understand.
At the same time, the English class system – so helpful to vintage crime writers like Agatha Christie – remains as destructive yet indestructible as ever.
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