When an investigative journalist checks in for plastic surgery to a private clinic in Dorset, you know she is going to end up with more than a nip and tuck.
With a more sadistic novelist, one would look forward gleefully to her demise. What is one investigative journalist more or less?
But compassion is a P.D. James hallmark. Even as she introduces her murder victim, Rhoda, one warms to her as a human being. The childhood scar she wants removed - remarking, enigmatically, that she no longer has any need of it - is an outward manifestation of an inner turbulence which James sketches with masterly skill.
We feel sorry, as we should do, when Rhoda is found murdered, strangled in her bed.
Who hated her enough to kill her? As the plot thickens, even the people working at the clinic with no previous connection to Rhoda - apparently - turn out to be bearers of ancient grudges.
There are family feuds, disputed wills, women who have killed before, spurned lovers, the whole glorious nonsense of the traditional English whodunit, in the hands of a master.
Time of death? Send for the forensic pathologist! Ready for another corpse? Look in that rusty freezer! You didn't think it was going to have frozen fish fingers in it, did you? As Commander Adam Dalgleish summons everyone to the library - where else? - you feel a little frisson of pure pleasure. The old-fashioned plot is as cosy and familiar as a log fire in winter.
P.D. James is knocking 90, and whoever takes up the baton of crime fiction when she is gone will certainly not set scenes in libraries.
Nor are they likely to match the wry elegance of her descriptions. 'A profusion of dark beams on the façade suggested that the architect had intended mock Tudor, but had been seduced by hubris to add a central cupola and Palladian front door.'
It will seem like double-Dutch to readers used to tales of serial killers in tower blocks in Walthamstow. But we should treasure James while we have her.
In terms of plotting, The Private Patient is only moderately gripping. But the characterisation, the accretion of detail, the overarching humanity is as impressive as ever.
As Dalgleish heads altar-wards with his fiancée, Emma, James fashions an ending which, in its emotional complexity, completely transcends the bog-standard denouement of a whodunit. It is beautifully done.
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