Word: agatha
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There certainly is no failure to entertain in A Certain Justice, her fourteenth novel. True, P.D. James rips off Agatha Christie to an appalling degree, but at least she does it well. The novel moves at a lightning pace, keeping the reader guessing with its red herrings and cleverly placed twists...
...James delivers them in buckets. The trickery that she laces within her story often rivals that of Agatha Christie--she provides an extended categorization of the suspects, and slowly begins to make it obvious who the killer really is. Right when you think you've discovered the identity of the murderer, however, your favorite suspect is brutally slayed. And then the game starts over again, and again, and again--until the one suspect that seemed absolutely innocent begins to take on a new light...
After Felix's inevitable imprisonment, publicist Brenda Bodkin continues his sleuthing just like a good Agatha Christie heroine would; her graceful conniving reawakens police interest in the case. Mortimer even indulges in the requisite bad pun or two, when Mirry speaks of being 'dead on time' or when the ever-lustful Felix fantasizes dramatically about "making his 'quietus with a bare bodkin." The solution to the mystery is not especially convoluted and veteran mystery fans will likely guess the conclusion long before the end, but in no way will this diminish their pleasure in the consistently suspenseful final chapters...
...skeptics, however, believe that all books are written ultimately by man. We have a simpler explanation: what men or women put into a book, other men or women can take out of a book--be it murky wordplays about the future ("assassin will assassinate"), Euclid's geometry, clues to Agatha Christie murders ("the butler did it") or a recipe book in any language ("add a pinch of salt"). BERNARD W. POWELL North Miami Beach...
...whose head owls and bats and other monsters of the unconscious are flitting, is clearly derived from the frontispiece to Tiepolo's Scherzi di Fantasia, a gravestone infested with owls. The terrible figure of the red-capped torturer looming behind the mutilated saint in Tiepolo's Martyrdom of Saint Agatha, c. 1755, seems to predict the primal energy of Goya's giants...