Volume 27, Number 12 · July 17, 1980
Threats of Violence
By Julian Symons
Innocent Blood
by P.D. James
Scribner's, 311 pp., $10.95
Another Part of the Wood
by Beryl Bainbridge
Braziller, 176 pp., $8.95
P.D. James is a mystery writer who with her new book has abandoned mystery. She began as a writer of orthodox detective stories in the English tradition. Her first book, Cover Her Face, opened with a tea party, and offered fairly conventional characters in a rural setting. But this book and its immediate successors seem not to have satisfied her, and in Shroud For a Nightingale (1971) she used her professional knowledge as a hospital administrator to give a realistic portrait of the Nightingale Training College for Nurses. The Black Tower (1975) is set in a home for incurables, and the crime is investigated by a detective who has just been reprieved from what was in effect a death sentence, a diagnosis of leukemia.
Review, 2634 words
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