Cheverell Manor, a historic and beautifully appointed Dorset mansion, might seem an ideal place to spend the run-up to Christmas. But this is a PD James novel. Run by plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell as a surgery-cum-country retreat, the house is awash with secrets and agendas. Chandler-Powell is in the closing stages of an illicit romance with his nurse, his surgical assistant Marcus wants to flee Dorset for Africa, Marcus's sister Candace is troubled by a friend's suicide and nearby stones are cursed with a witch's blood. James chucks a disputed will, a long-buried murder and investigative journalist Rhoda Gradwyn into the mix, before having Gradwyn strangled and setting sainted detective and poet Adam Dalgliesh on the scent. Her old-fashioned tale has its red herrings and entertaining asides, as well as a few flashes of genuine dread, but the exposition-stuffed dialogue gets tiring, and several attempts to spice things up with philosophy fall flat. Dalgliesh fans will get their fix; anyone else will be entertained for a few hours.

you know you're in the company of PD James from the first sentence: elegantly phrased, plot-driven, multi-layered and laced with menace. By the time you reach the final line, you may decide that the conclusion to this, the 88-year-old crime writer's 16th thriller, is flawed, but there is a quality to the writing that makes The Private Patient a pleasure to read, nevertheless.
This is because James writes novels first, crime novels second. There is always an emphasis on characterisation, even if you know there will also be gruesome murders. Settling down to her latest book is like lying on freshly laundered sheets only to find something horrid at the bottom of the bed.
Rhoda Gradwyn, a notorious investigative journalist, decides to have reconstructive cosmetic surgery for childhood facial scarring at a private clinic in a manor house. The operation is to be the start of her new life; what Rhoda doesn't realise is that James has foretold her untimely end in her first paragraph.

The clinic gives James her setting, which she describes in evocative detail, and her captive group of suspects. As in many of her novels, we're in the claustrophobic company of the unfashionable middle classes, with some working-class oddities thrown in: emotionally repressed and ambitious men, domestic staff with secrets, singular-looking women who can spot the difference between a zinnia and a dahlia at 50 paces. Go elsewhere if you like your thrillers gritty and street-wise. Nevertheless, there is plenty of intrigue and, as the story unfolds, a nicely simmering undercurrent of violence.

James lingers lovingly over the setting up of the action, introducing her cast like the characters on a Cluedo board. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, James's beloved detective, doesn't pitch up until we're a quarter of the way through, along with Detective Inspector Kate Miskin and Sergeant Francis Benton-Smith. Over the years, Dalgliesh has become too good to be true. Now, about to be married to the ever-patient Emma, he seems to float through the book, irritatingly wise and blandly without fault. Throughout The Private Patient it's up to Benton-Smith and Miskin to make the errors of judgment that enrich the plot of any thriller. As it is, they're a bit too perfect, too.

The story rattles along, propelled, as always, by James's eloquent way with words. Love in all its guises, both healing and destructive, is her theme. But in the end, too many characters drift into the margins.

Like many thrillers, this concludes in a ludicrously concocted way. In the best, we don't care  it's the journey that makes it worthwhile. But for all its eloquent description and fine scene setting, its graceful sentences and moral nuances, The Private Patient lacks the dramatic vigour of vintage PD James.