The private patient

Review by New York Times Review

The traditional comforts of the British country house mystery - puzzling plot, attractive setting, brainy detective, interesting characters - spill from P. D. James's latest novel, THE PRIVATE PATIENT (Knopf, $25.95), like harvest bounty from a cornucopia. The locale, which always sets the tone and determines the content of James's elegant storytelling, couldn't be more conducive for a quiet murder: Cheverell Manor, a Tudor pile in the Dorset countryside, for generations a blueblood family seat but now the private home and exclusive clinic of the renowned plastic surgeon, Dr. George Chandler-Powell. Inviting a mystery lover into this historic residence, with its timbered great hall and grand staircase leading to treasure-filled upper rooms, is like whispering "Once upon a time ..." to a child. Of course, inside Cheverell Manor, all is not as serene as the brows in the family portraits. The head nurse is unhappy with her role as the doctor's mistress. The housemaid is obsessed with the legend of a witch-burning at the Cheverell Stones, a prehistoric circle on the estate grounds. The surgical assistant is thinking of going to Africa to do good works, leaving his sister to fend off claims on their inheritance. And how happy can the estate manager be, numbly serving as caretaker of the home her father lost when Lloyd's of London crashed? Like the taciturn old gardener with the Dickensian moniker of Mogworthy ("a mine of information" for anyone who can induce him to talk), these are the kind of stock characters we're comfortable with in a classic whodunit. But with James in charge, they expand their functional roles to become complex individuals with troubled psychological histories. Even Rhoda Gradwyn, the patient who arrives at the clinic so she can be offered up to the plot as a murder victim, turns out to be a person of parts. As "one of the worst kind" of investigative journalists, Rhoda could pose a threat to someone in this secretive household. But James shows her primarily as a vulnerable patient, finally able to get rid of a disfiguring facial scar, borne in angry defiance for 34 years, because "I no longer have need of it." It takes a detective of deep intelligence and sensitivity to deal with the high-strung residents of Cheverell Manor, and for this, Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh is your man. Once he and his team settle in, people start cracking and the secrets come tumbling out. And if the resolution feels a bit rushed, chalk it up to the fact that Dalgliesh has to get a move on if he expects to make that long-awaited wedding day with his beloved Emma. Lucky for us, all the Swedish cops in THE INNER CIRCLE (St. Martin's Minotaur, $25.95) slept through their history classes on the Nordic gods. Difficult as that is to believe, it allows Mari Jungstedt to deliver stern minilectures about these ancient deities, whose followers left evidence of their culture buried all over the island of Gotland, where this mystery is set. Since more than 700 silver hoards from the Viking Age have already been unearthed, it's common to find human skeletons on archaeological digs like the one near Frojel Church. But it's not so common to find decapitated horses and ritualistically murdered archaeology students. Jungstedt writes briskly (in an efficient translation by Tiina Nunnally) about the growing frustration of Detective Superintendent Anders Knutas as he tries to make sense of these senseless acts. While she handles the gory details of the case with real verve and humanizes some of the emotionally chilly characters, Jungstedt's true passion seems to be Gotland itself. From the quaint medieval town of Visby to the wilderness promontory of Vivesholm, its landscape inspires a devotion the old gods would envy. For anyone who once held a career in government service and now feels the urge to unburden, anonymity is the way to go. James Church, the name taken by "a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia," created the cunning Inspector O to convey the surreal conditions of modern-day life in North Korea. Set earlier than the previous books in Church's headspinning series of thrillers, BAMBOO AND BLOOD (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95) takes place in the frigid winter of 1997, when people were dying of cold and famine. During this "winter of endless sorrow," O is assigned to guard a mysterious foreigner who is allowed to wander into remote territory, setting off deep speculation about the government's ulterior motives. Of this dangerous propensity for convoluted thought, the inspector says, "Many animals hibernate in winter; I drift into philosophy." Elizabeth Ironside, the nom de plume chosen by the wife of a former British ambassador to the United States, secretly wrote a number of novels during her years of foreign travel as a diplomat's Spouse. A GOOD DEATH (Felony & Mayhem, paper, $14.95), which is set in the French countryside after the collapse of the Vichy government, gives short shrift to all those romantic legends about the French Resistance. In the haunted eyes of Theo de Cazalle, an aide to General de Gaulle, foreign troops were not the only ones who destroyed his country. Upon returning to his rural estate, he hears terrible stories connecting his wife with the dead German found on his front lawn, and sees for himself the vindictive acts committed by local factions of the Maquis. "Village war is not less significant than world war," he comes to realize over the course of this bleak and beautiful novel. "Village war is world war." P.D. James's latest novel is filled with the traditional comforts of the British country house mystery.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]

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Review by Booklist Review

At 88, P. D. James has written her eighteenth novel, a feat in itself. Inevitably, there is plenty of summing up going on here, as Commander Adam Dalgleish approaches marriage and contemplates retirement from Scotland Yard. But before either of those life-changing events can take place, there is another case to solve, and Dalgleish's special investigating team, their murder bags packed, are on the road to a remote corner of Dorset, where a well-known investigative journalist has been killed following surgery at a private clinic. As usual, James places Dalgleish, Inspector Kate Miskin, and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith within an insular community and asks them to restore order to a tightly circumscribed world jarred by unnatural death. We follow the process of interviews with the staff at Cheverell Manor, a grand Tudor home converted to a clinic by a famous plastic surgeon, and we once again begin to formulate our list of suspects along with Dalgleish and the team. This time, though, James pays a bit less attention to the lives of the suspects and more to Dalgleish's inner turmoil (and, to some extent, that of Miskin and Benton-Smith). Longtime readers will be fine with this subtle switch in emphasis, as we sense the winding down of the landmark series and crave every possible insight into a character who has meant so much not only to his fans but also to the mystery genre itself. If this is the last Dalgleish novel, James has struck a fine valedictory note for her hero.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The latest (and perhaps final) mystery featuring Cmdr. Adam Dalgliesh of the Metropolitan Police Service finds him preparing to confront crucial turning points in his life and career. Meanwhile, he must solve the murder of a ruthlessly inquisitive investigative journalist who was killed in a private Dorset clinic just hours after a pre-eminent plastic surgeon removed her disfiguring facial scar. Dalgliesh and his team unearth a plethora of motives (and an ugly secret or three) as they investigate the inhabitants of the secluded manor that houses the clinic. Rosalyn Landor's lovely, well-bred tones add warmth, color and precision to this fully rounded, compassionately told mystery. She gives every character his or her own voice, clearly delineating gender, age and social class. Her voice combines with James's text to lend sympathy to each character, regardless of what sins he or she may have committed. In every way, this is a perfect auditory experience. A Knopf hardcover (Reviews, Sept. 22). (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

If there's murder in a nursing home, call in Adam Dalgliesh. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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On November the twenty-first, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went to Harley Street to keep a first appointment with her plastic surgeon, and there in a consulting room designed, so it appeared, to inspire confidence and allay apprehension, made the decision which would lead inexorably to her death. Later that day she was to lunch at The Ivy. The timing of the two appointments was fortuitous. Mr. Chandler-Powell had no earlier date to offer and the luncheon later with Robin Boyton, booked for twelve-forty-five, had been arranged two months previously; one did not expect to get a table at The Ivy on impulse. She regarded neither appointment as a birthday celebration. This detail of her private life, like much else, was never mentioned. She doubted whether Robin had discovered her date of birth or would much care if he had. She knew herself to be a respected, even distinguished journalist, but she hardly expected her name to appear in the Times list of VIP birthdays. She was due at Harley Street at eleven-fifteen. Usually with a London appointment she preferred to walk at least part of the way, but today she had ordered a taxi for ten-thirty. The journey from the City shouldn't take three-quarters of an hour, but the London traffic was unpredictable. She was entering a world that was strange to her and had no wish to jeopardise her relationship with her surgeon by arriving late for this their first meeting. Eight years ago she had taken a lease on a house in the City, part of a narrow terrace in a small courtyard at the end of Absolution Alley, near Cheapside, and knew as soon as she moved in that this was the part of London in which she would always choose to live. The lease was long and renewable; she would have liked to buy the house, but knew that it would never be for sale. But the fact that she couldn't hope to call it entirely her own didn't distress her. Most of it dated back to the seventeenth century. Many generations had lived in it, been born and died there, leaving behind nothing but their names on browning and archaic leases, and she was content to be in their company. Although the lower rooms with their mullioned windows were dark, those in her study and sitting room on the top storey were open to the sky, giving a view of the towers and steeples of the City and beyond. An iron staircase led from a narrow balcony on the third floor to a secluded roof, which held a row of terra-cotta pots and where on fine Sunday mornings she could sit with her book or newspapers as the Sabbath calm lengthened into midday and the early peace was broken only by the familiar peals of the City bells. The City which lay below was a charnel house built on multilayered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, doublelocking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seemed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked these streets and had known the same silence. She knew that on summer weekends, a few hundred Excerpted from The Private Patient by P. D. James All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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