Innocent Blood

⚖The case for it

Philippa built herself from nothing, a bright girl who goes looking for the parents she never knew and turns up a criminal record where she wanted a mother. Yes, losing Dalgliesh drains the forward drive James usually runs on. She swaps it for a harder thing: a self-made young woman colliding with a fact she cannot bend to fit the story she invented about her own beginnings. Who do you become when your origins refuse to flatter you? James understood that crime fiction and the psychological novel were never two separate rooms.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

James abandons the detective and the pace goes with him. Philippa is a heroine of studied coldness, hard to spend three hundred pages beside, and the plot depends on contrivances James would never have permitted Dalgliesh: a bereaved husband teaching himself surveillance, every clue cooperating. The class snobbery, always present in her work, here goes unchaperoned.

— the honest librarian