What an expert writer P. D. James was! Her books are often a challenge in the beginning, with so many characters to keep straight, all seemingly tangentially connected to the crime. But then she slowly weaves everything together under Adam Dalgleish’s painstaking gaze and, in the end, he has prepared the way for justice. In this case, the setting is Hoggatt’s, the premier forensic laboratory outside London, with its many highly educated and intense doctors, biologists, and other specialists and their many peccadilloes. When one of their number is murdered, there are as many reasons to hate him as there are staff members, and Dalgleish and his assistant Massingham have to separate truth from lies and what the lies are covering up. James’s clever idea to set a murder inside a forensic laboratory gives her plenty of opportunity to write about biological evidence, and she does a nice job of exploring where science fits in detection. Aspiring scientist Brenda Pridmore explained what she learned from lab director Dr. Howarth: If scientists’ experiment fail, he explained, “the scientists have to find another theory to fit the facts… With science, there’s this exciting paradox, that disillusionment needn’t be defeat” (223). But in the end it is intuition and careful induction on Dalgleish’s part that reveal the crime.