The touch of symbolism is not gentle in Original Sin, P. D. James's latest mystery featuring Comdr. Adam Dalgliesh of New Scotland Yard. At the story's opening, Mandy Price, a young temporary typist, rides her motorbike to work at The Peverell Press, a venerable London publishing firm situated in a mock-Venetian palace on the Thames called Innocent House.

When Mandy arrives, she is taken upstairs by Claudia Etienne, a senior executive, to fetch a tape recording that needs transcribing. Miss Etienne pushes open the door to the archive room. As the text then reads:

The stink rolled out to meet out to meet them like an evil wraith, the familiar smell of vomit, not strong but so unexpected that Mandy instinctively recoiled. Over Miss Etienne's shoulder her eyes took in at once a small room with an uncarpeted wooden floor, a square table to the right of the door and a single high window. Under the window was a narrow divan bed and on the bed sprawled a woman.

It had needed no smell to tell Mandy that she was looking at death.

Catapulted by this strong opening, the reader races ahead to learn that the woman on the bed has committed suicide, in part because she has been sacked by the house's new head, Gerard Etienne, Claudia's brother, a brusquely forceful man who wants to modernize Peverell Press. In the process he will make many enemies, and apparently for this reason he will soon be discovered in the same archive room dead of carbon monoxide poisoning. Wrapped around his neck with its head stuffed in his mouth will be found a toy snake made of striped green velvet and "intended to be laid along the bottom of doors to exclude draughts, or wound round the handles to keep the door ajar."

In a novel called Original Sin, a snake has been wrapped around a corpse in a place called Innocent House. Beside the building flows the River Thames, described portentously enough in the novel to suggest the river of life.

Yet however heavily such symbolism may weigh, Miss James for a change actually develops its meaning here instead of squandering it as she has done so often in her previous fiction. As the plot of Original Sin develops, the apparent frivolousness of representing evil with a button-eyed toy snake seems more and more appropriate considering its irrelevance to the real guilt that hands over Innocent House.

And as the reason for Etienne's murder is revealed, we are confronted with deep issues of sin and retribution, one of the most perplexing of which engages Inspector Daniel Aaron, a subordinate of Dalgliesh's who asks of his Jewish heritage: "Why must I define myself by the wrongs others have done to my race? The guilt was bad enough; do I have to carry the burden of innocence also? I'm a Jew, isn't that enough? Do I have to represent to myself and others the evil of mankind?"

The real trouble with Original Sin, as so often with Miss James's fiction, is the disturbing clutter of its narrative. For all its philosophical questing, the story remains at heart a whodunit, and much of its energy goes to pumping up plausible suspects who are either not thematically relevant or not particularly interesting. Among these is Esme Carling, a mystery writer about whom her agent remarks after she is murdered: "She wasn't that bad. I mean, she could write literate prose, and that's rare enough nowadays. Peverell Press wouldn't have published her otherwise. She wasn't consistent. Just when you thought: God, I can't go on with this boring drivel, she'd produce a really good passage and the book would suddenly come alive."

One has to bite one's tongue.

And then there is Miss James's insistence on describing absolutely everything. She does write literate prose that creates a variety of moods. But so much of her scene-setting serves no other purpose than to create impenetrable atmosphere. For instance, pages are devoted to describing in loving detail the locale of a lunch that Dalgliesh eats with a friend, the Cadaver Club, "not among the most prestigious of London's private clubs but its coterie of members find it among the most convenient." And yet the story never returns there.

A character can't enter a room without being lost in its furnishings. A result is the loss of all sense of pace. When the story reaches its climax and details become important to what's happening, the narrative has no reserves to draw upon.

You also have to wonder sometimes about Miss James's awareness of her effects. Surely, given the novel's symbolic threads, an incident in which a character returns home to find her garden vandalized by motor bikers is intended to be a play on her central theme of paradise lost. But why, having introduced a woman with two children who, during World War II, was betrayed and sent to Auschwitz, does she insist on naming her Sophie? Is this by choice? Then what is the point? Some sort of obscure homage to William Styron? Or is it simply inadvertent?

Like so much else in Original Sin, this detail leaves you wondering if the story is far more subtle than you are giving it credit for being or if there is simply less here than meets the eye.