However, The Private Patient opens with a bang:
“On November the twenty-first, the day of her forty-seventh birthday, and three weeks and two days before she was murdered, Rhoda Gradwyn went to Harley Street to keep a first appointment with her plastic surgeon...”
In James’s clever hands, knowing from the very first the identity of the murdered woman doesn’t in the least destroy the suspense and drama of the novel.
Rhoda Gradwyn, it turns out, is an investigative journalist who has, in her time, made more than a few enemies. She has come to Mr. Chandler-Powell (the British don’t refer to master surgeons as “Dr.”) seeking removal of a disfiguring facial scar.
Her murder occurs at a private medical facility run by Chandler-Powell on an estate known as Cheverell Manor. The fact that it doesn’t happen until chapter fifteen is a master stroke that allows James plenty of time to set the scene and introduce a remarkable number of possible suspects with varying motives.
There is a lovely little final chapter about the wedding of Dalgliesh and his Emma that seems almost a sop to James’s fans, and not really part of this tale at all (although the impending date is referred to several times in the text). The scene is reminiscent of the wedding of Dorothy L. Sayers’s creations, Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, in her famous mystery, Busman’s Holiday. Whether or not James’s description of the event is an intended homage to Ms. Sayers, it will leave you with a warm send-off.
For this reviewer, one of the great joys of reading a book by Baroness James is simply her elegant and eloquent use of the English language. If you have read any of the mystery trade’s recent best-sellers, but haven’t yet discovered James, you are in for a lesson in the writing of good prose. That that lesson will prove to be a pleasant read is, indeed, the proverbial icing on the cake.
— JS
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