A Certain Justice

[sawyl]

In my continuing obsession with P.D. James mysteries, I've reached A Certain Justice, which I thought I hadn't read before but, around the halfway mark, I realised I must have read it when it first came out.

Having just got Garry Ashe acquitted of murder, Venetia Aldridge QC isn't best pleased when she finds that he has taken up with her 18 year-old, semi-estranged daughter, Octavia. But when she casts around for help, Venetia finds herself out of luck. Her married lover, a rather shallow MP, is more interested in protecting his reputation than helping. Drysdale Laud, her nearest thing to a friend, still smarting from discovery that Venetia is trying to usurp his role as heir apparent to the current Head of Chambers, isn't much use either.

With her gift for offending people, it isn't greatly surprising when Venetia turns up dead at her desk, a blood-spattered wig sat on her head. Called in to investigate, Adam Dalgliesh and his gang have to decide whether the murder was an inside job, in which case the killing could have been committed by one of Aldridge's fellow lawyers; whether the murder might have something to do with her murky past; or whether she was killed by her daughter's prole boyfriend.

While I'm not sure that I was ever really convinced by the character of the victim, who seemed only to exist in a single dimension — that of ace lawyer — I rather liked the rest of the cast. I particularly liked Hubert Langton, the aging Head of Chambers gripped by the desperate fear that his mind was failing, and Desmond Ulrick, a brilliant but deeply self-centred man who sneered at anyone who thought that the law should be anything other than a intellectual exercise. I also thought that the disastrous romance between Octavia and Garry worked rather well. Octavia had just the right degree of desperation, and the way that she alternated between being completely unbearable and being frantic for affection had a certain authenticity to it.