The odd murder aside, this is a book about the way we live now. Not for the first time, PD James depicts a contemporary Britain where it is hardly possible for anyone to be happy, such is the level of class warfare and the daily desperation brought about by the general ungraciousness of this dystopian island.

The lower middle classes see “their morality despised, their savings devalued...their children taught in overcrowded schools where 90% of the children spoke no English”, while an upper-class couple speak in “an unselfconscious distinctive accent...which would have effectively banned them from any hope of a job at the BBC or even a career in politics, had either unlikely option appealed to them”. “Winterfest” is decreed in city centres, while on the outskirts of those cities, “the rain-soaked lanterns and faded bunting...seemed less a celebration than a desperate defence against despair”. The social services are breaking down, a welfare officer casually admitting that an absconding miscreant has slipped through the net. Even Commander Adam Dalgliesh's brilliant and respected Special Investigation Squad is not immune from governmental chaos: it is about to be rationalised, its functions defined “in contemporary jargon devised to obscure rather than illumine”.

Dalgliesh is distracted from planning his wedding to the elegant Emma Lavenham by being required to solve the murder of an investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, at Cheverell Manor, a private clinic in Dorset, where she had gone to have a disfiguring facial scar removed. With her customary crispness, James announces that Rhoda's days are numbered in the first sentence of the book, immediately establishing an atmosphere of twitchy foreboding.

Seduced by the clinic's pampering privacy, Rhoda fails to notice that its remote location is far from reassuring. At the end of its lime avenue, the Cheverell Stones palely gleam, 12 lichen-covered boulders of which the tallest is a typically Jamesian evil omen. In 1654, a woman was bound to this stone and burnt as a witch. And now, awaiting surgery is Rhoda, “a stalker of minds”, a destroyer of reputations, a woman who more than one person would probably like to burn alive. Inside the manor's handsome rooms there is delicious food, warmth and comfort; outside it, an avian battleground disturbs the night, full of yelps and shudders as predators crunch their prey. It's as though the whole dark world is set upon murder.

Several references are made to a 1958 crime novel, Untimely Death, by Cyril Hare, and James employs some classic 1950s techniques in homage to that excellent writer: the entire staff of the manor is summoned for questioning by Dalgliesh and his team; there are precisely detailed descriptions of the house and its clinic, and investigations into whirring lifts and unlocked doors. Some of those involved have reason to have loathed Rhoda; she had castigated in print a particular Lloyds Name and a promising young writer, both of whom had connections to members of the manor's workforce. There is also ill-feeling towards its owner, the distinguished plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell, a man so brutally disconnected from both staff and patients that it's highly likely that someone might like to see his prosperous clinic come a cropper by being turned into a murder scene.

Chandler-Powell is the antithesis of Dalgliesh, that most tender of policeman-poets, solicitous not only of his beloved Emma, but also of Kate Miskin, his devoted DS. James brings a stinging clarity to the complicated goings-on in the Dorset countryside; its grotesque mysteries decoded by Dalgliesh, whose loving heart and the gallantry that seems to lie in his bones are talismans against the murderous instincts of the unloved.

The Private Patient by PDJames
Faber £18.99 pp395

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