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A review by savaging
A Mind to Murder by P.D. James
3.0
This book is like Sudoku in story-problem form. That means it's mostly full of tedious details, so the careful reader can deduce an answer. It's impossible to skim but not really gripping enough to read deeply.
I actually kind of like that James prioritizes the mystery over the aesthetic, so this doesn't sink into some kind of Philip Marlowe noire nonsense. Detective Dalgliesh isn't rugged or tortured or supernaturally brilliant. The murder takes place in a psychiatric clinic, but James never tries to make the tone spookier by making readers think that people with mental illness are creepy and crazy. It's about nearly-normal conflict among professionals within a bureaucracy -- the setting is almost incidental.
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I actually kind of like that James prioritizes the mystery over the aesthetic, so this doesn't sink into some kind of Philip Marlowe noire nonsense. Detective Dalgliesh isn't rugged or tortured or supernaturally brilliant. The murder takes place in a psychiatric clinic, but James never tries to make the tone spookier by making readers think that people with mental illness are creepy and crazy. It's about nearly-normal conflict among professionals within a bureaucracy -- the setting is almost incidental.
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