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P.D. James' latest mystery lacks her usual knife edge

By Janet Maslin New York Times News Service

The Private PatientBy P.D. James. Alfred A. Knopf. 352 pp. $25.95.

The Private Patient, P.D. James' latest exercise in impeccable detection, begins with a woman named Rhoda Gradwyn. She is a muck raking London journalist, but she sounds like one of James' patricians just the same. Miss Gradwyn is to enter an elite clinic where a plastic surgeon with a hyphenated name, Mr. George H. Chandler-Powell, will at long last remove a scar from her face.

"Why now, Miss Gradwyn?" the doctor inquires. "Because I no longer have need of it," she answers. Hmm.

Several weeks later, the surgery is performed at the doctor's picturesque clinic, in the grand old Cheverell Manor in Dorset. It's a success. And then Miss Gradwyn is throttled in the middle of the night by someone wearing latex gloves. This is dreadful news, not only for the victim but for her renowned doctor.

"The clinic could hardly continue after Miss Gradwyn's murder," one of the book's many characters says. "Only patients with a pathologically morbid fascination with death and horror would book in at the Manor now." And only aficionados of tales of detection in grand English country houses will want to know more about this story.

As usual, James' tale is in a tony setting. Along comes Commander Adam Dalgliesh, James' specialist in elegant country-house crimes.

First, there is a deceased Uncle Peregrine, and the disposition of his fortune will affect the clinic's staff. Second, the woman whose family had to sell Cheverell Manor to the wealthy doctor is still hanging on as part of the household, perhaps peacefully and perhaps tacitly boiling with rage.

And third, as the book's title indicates, the place proudly treats its patients with the utmost discretion. Should the fact that an investigative journalist has wormed her way into it raise any eyebrows among those investigating the murder?

James wrings as many questions as possible from Rhoda Gradwyn's death. Why was her gold-digging young male friend, himself distantly linked to old Uncle Peregrine, on the premises when this patient died? Why were midnight lights seen at the circle of 12 Cheverell Stones near the manor house, a spooky outdoor spot once associated with witch-burning?

The book's array of red herrings is choice, and its characters have ample motive and opportunity to do wrong. But the plotting of The Private Patient isn't up to this author's diabolical best.

Dalgliesh's deductions are not at their Holmesian sharpest, but he has other matters on his mind. He is inching closer to both retirement and Emma, the woman who brings out the poet in him and the atypically cumbersome wordsmith in James.

Somewhere along the way, The Private Patient loses track of and interest in its title character. Rhoda Gradwyn's past is of great interest to some of the book's characters but not to the reader. And her scar, the book's original detective-ready detail? The scar has a story but not a great one. Sometimes plastic surgery is just plastic surgery, after all.