Another audio reread. This is the second (and last) of the Cordelia Gray books. It’s not nearly as good as the first one. The set up is too long and there’s no body for about a million pages. The lack of a corpse isn’t a problem but the fact that there isn’t really any air of impending doom is. James’s array of upper class characters all seem to lack a third dimension. The island setting is the best part of the book and even that isn’t very well evoked. I had real trouble with there being a character called Clarissa as well as the character called Cordelia. The names were too similar and the characters too wooden for me to keep them apart.

At the end of the book Cordelia decides that she’s better off investigating lost kittens than murders. It’s a curious way to end a book but you can’t help getting the impression that PD James was already bored with Cordelia before she finished this second book so I think she is better left to her own devices.