[These notes were made in 1988:]. I thought I might not like this James as much as some others because it does not star her detective Adam Dalgliesh. But in fact Dalgliesh is a sort of ghostly presence throughout: he was the mentor of the business partner of the young woman, Cordelia Gray, who is investigating the suicide (it turns out to be a murder, of course) at the centre of the plot. Cordelia's partner also committed suicide. She, left alone with a less than flourishing detective business, is given an assignment by an apparently respectable scientist, to find out just why his college-age son left Cambridge, went to work as a gardener, and killed himself, all in the space of a few weeks. There are a number of very strange characters involved, and it turns out there is some mystery surrounding the parentage of the young man himself. But the final motive is money -- Mark (that's his name) was going to come into a great deal of money from his maternal grandmother. When he discovered, as he did in the last weeks of his life, that the woman he supposed had been his mother wasn't, he resolved not to take up his inheritance. This leads to his death; he is killed by his own father, whose mania about the scientific establishment he is trying to run is matched by a pure callousness about individual humans. Among the victims of this callousness is the woman who runs his household: a woman who turns out to be Mark's real mother, and who, near the end of the book, in Cordelia's presence, kills the scientist with Cordelia's gun. Here Cordelia diverges from the usual path of the detective, and not only does not divulge this murder to the police, but helps the unfortunate Miss Leaming conceal her crime very effectively. I have omitted all sorts of sub-plot here; for instance, a gruesome attempt is made on Cordelia's life by a sort of adopted son of the scientist (he throws her down an abandoned well), and he, as well as the scientist and Miss Leaming, ends up dead by the end of the novel. But Adam Dalgliesh, into whose hands this case finally falls, is no fool. He suspects what we readers know to be the actual state of affairs, and gives Cordelia every chance to tell him the truth. But one gets the impression that he is rather glad, after all, that she sticks to her story, and the whole thing remains officially unsolved. Character triumphs over the mechanics of plot once again, to my great delight.
