A wonderful police procedural

Blood Line Travis Novel Mysteries

P.D. James started out as a more or less conventional detective novelist. She writes the typical cerebral English muder mystery, and is the closest thing to an heir Agatha Christie has had since she passed away. Christie almost always emphasized a complicated plot, with a murder "puzzle" mystery that required Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot to solve, and she usually resolved the plots more or less completely. James is content to include a mystery, and not so determined to have things tied up neatly at the end, so the books have a more modern feel to them. She's also, for whatever reason, much more interested in the incidental characters in her books. Christie emphasized the mystery itself; James changes the emphasis, and pays attention to the various participants, their actions, thoughts, feelings, families, and so forth.

So we come to the latest book. The title character is the victim Rhoda Gradwyn, a patient of a private medical clinic in rural England. She's an investigative journalist, and she's lived all of her life with a pretty horrific scar on her face, which she now decides to have removed or mitigated as much as possible. Rather than undergo Britain's National Health Service and its waiting lists, she engages a private surgeon, who runs a clinic in the rural English countryside called Cheverall Manor. It's an English country estate whose owner fell on hard times, and had to sell, and the surgeon has staffed it with nurses, an assistant, and various maids, along with a husband and wife cooking team. Rhoda is expected to stay a week after the surgery, recovering, but she's murdered the first night.

Dalgliesh and his team are summoned to work out who killed her. At first they are confused why the locals aren't left in charge, but when it appears that a very wealthy and prominent socialite was in the room next to Gradwyn's, waiting on surgery the next day, that part of the mystery is solved. The rest of it takes some unravelling, and the result isn't completely satisfactory to most of the participants, but the reader should enjoy the course of the novel and its conclusion.

The way this book is written, it could serve as the last Dalgliesh novel. I'm unaware if there's another. As of this writing author James will turn 91 some time this year, and that makes this book (published the year the author turned 88) rather remarkable. If it is the last, it's a fine end to the series; if not, I look forward to the next book.

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