I get annoyed with PD James because of the feeling that surrounds her that says that she’s head and shoulders better than every other crime writer around. That and the fact that she only writes about terribly posh people as if that’s all there is in the world. This is a version of the very traditional English detective story - deaths in a small community where only an insider can be guilty. The story is nothing terribly inventive and there are a hundred crime writers out there writing tales set around much better plots.

The characters here are pretty well drawn though; I find them all slightly unbelievable just because of who they are but they do appear real all the same. There’s a sense that James is taking the mickey out of herself when someone comments that not all of the twenty students at the theological college the book is set at have had priviledged upbringings - one of them actually came through the state school system.

I haven’t read any James for quite a while, apart from rereading the two Cordelia Grey books on audio last year, I read most of them as a teenager and I’m not sure I’d be able to put up with the characters for long enough to read them all again now. I always find Inspector Kate Miskin to be a shadow of what she could be. Her background is one of poverty and working her way up the ranks of the Met and it never rings true. Kate sometimes feels out of place in the circles Dalgleish moves in, both social and literary, but I always feel she’s just been put in for show. Perhaps it’s just that at the end of the day she is the sidekick and Dalgleish is the main attraction but I do wish James had made her more than she has.

This isn’t a bad book just not a terribly exciting, interesting or innovative one.