Private Patient, the (BBC Radio 4 Drama)

Starred review from September 22, 2008
In James's stellar 14th Adam Dalgliesh mystery (after 2006's The Lighthouse
), the charismatic police commander knows the case of Rhoda Gradwyn, a 47-year-old journalist murdered soon after undergoing the removal of an old disfiguring scar at a private plastic surgery clinic in Dorset, may be his last; James's readers will fervently hope it isn't. Dalgliesh probes the convoluted tangle of motives and hidden desires that swirl around the clinic, Cheverell Manor, and its grimly fascinating suspects in the death of Gradwyn, herself “a stalker of minds” driven by her lifelong passion for rooting out the truth people would prefer left unknown and then selling it for money. Beyond the book's central moral concern, James meditates on universal problems like aging (“the amorphous flattening of self”) and the government's education policy, which targets 50% of the young as university-bound while ensuring that another 40% are uneducated on leaving secondary school. Against her relentless intellectual view of our dying earth, James pits the love she finally grants Dalgleish—sufficient to reinvigorate hope and faith so rare in both fiction and reality today.

P.D. James delivers another fascinating Adam Dalgliesh mystery. The enigmatic Scotland Yard commander investigates the murder of a journalist who is killed in a posh private clinic in Dorset just after undergoing plastic surgery. James's latest manages to plumb the depths of investigative journalism, probing tender secrets and sensational scandals. Environmental issues, aging, and the hope of new love are also part of the story. Roslyn Landor lends the characters' voices appropriate, subtle, and insightful tones that reflect their age, social standing, gender, and education. Overall, her clarity and soft British accent complement the fourteenth Dalgliesh outing. A finely crafted conundrum, intricately layered. A.W. (c) AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine