[In the following review, Macintyre states that James resolves the plot in A Certain Justice, but ends the novel with moral and emotional questions left unanswered.]

For her latest murderous mise en scene, [A Certain Justice,] P. D. James takes us to a set of lawyers' chambers in London's Middle Temple, the heart of the English legal establishment, a closed and comfortable world encrusted with centuries of respectability, precedent and reasoned argument. There we find Venetia Aldridge, a celebrated and widely detested barrister, propped at her desk with a neat hole in her heart left by a letter opener, a sharpened replica of the sword of justice; on her head is a judge's horsehair wig dripping with fresh blood that, it swiftly becomes apparent, does not come from the veins of the late and unlamented Venetia Aldridge.

This macabre montage is vintage James: the language of ancient place and tradition—temples, chambers, oak paneling, afternoon tea—colliding with a grisly modern murder, inexplicably staged and defying logic. Here are intimations of desecration, of calm outward lives torn apart by inner violence: the genteel juxtaposed with the gruesome.

There are few more English writers than Baroness James of Holland Park. "The English … obviously regarded praying much as they did a necessary physical function, something best done in private," she writes. "A necessary physical function" sounds like the sort of euphemism one would find in the rule book of an English boarding school circa 1930, but it is precisely the contrast between such external fastidiousness and the complex, sometimes depraved internal lives of James's characters that gives her books such emotive power.

We know what is coming to Venetia Aldridge, Queen's Counsel, from the third sentence of A Certain Justice, when the author notes that the lawyer has "four weeks, four hours and fifty minutes left of life." Over those four weeks, James assembles the composing elements of her doomed character, the childhood and profession that have made her so successful—and so repellent. Aldridge is single-minded, arrogant, callous and utterly determined to further her career. She exploits the weakness of others with glinting disdain, seeing the law not as a mechanism of equity but as a test of intellectual cunning and dramatic talent.

Under English law, a barrister need not be convinced of a client's innocence and must withdraw only if certain of his or her guilt. For Aldridge, the distinction appears moot, for the more compelling the evidence of evildoing, the greater the challenge to introduce reasonable doubt in the jury's mind, and the higher the professional rewards of success. This is, James writes, "a lucrative game according to complicated rules … a game that was sometimes won at the cost of a human life."

Aldridge shows no evidence that she cares whether Garry Ashe, an intelligent young psychopath as adept at the game as she, murdered his prostitute aunt in a gritty and condemned council house. She minds only that she gets him off, and so, with a typically virtuoso courtroom performance, she does.

The moral conundrum at the heart of James's tale lies in the double-entendre of its title. Is justice certain in the sense of exact or immutable, or is it only a certain measure of fairness, qualified and incomplete?

"Most of us have to live with the results of what we do. Actions have consequences…. She won her victories and that, for her, was the end; others have had to live with the consequences, others have paid the price," one of her "victims" notes after discovering that the better the lawyer, the greater the capacity to perpetrate an injustice by enabling the guilty to go free.

Aldridge begins to wonder about the cost (if never the legal principle) of defending a man she knows is not innocent only when the acquitted Ashe takes up with her unhappy, unattractive and unloved daughter, Octavia, and thus becomes the first among a host of potential suspects when the barrister ends up on the wrong end of her own sword of justice, bewigged and soaked in another's gore.

In the best whodunit tradition, there are at least a dozen possible candidates for her murderer, each with motive, means and malice: her fellow barristers, the office cleaner, the sleazy Member of Parliament who wants to break off their mutually cynical affair, the schoolmaster who inspired the victim's taste for the law and keeps an obsessive scrapbook of her cases.

In less subtle hands these might lapse into cliché or caricature, but instead James leaves the lingering sense that each life is a separate embryonic novel, possibly irrelevant to "the case" but individually real. She sketches each with a few deft brushstrokes: Harold Naughton, the elderly and respectful clerk with his uncertain future and cauterized emotions—"When the children were at home, Harold got on well with them both. He had never found it difficult to get on well with strangers." Or Drysdale Laud, the bachelor barrister whose path to head of chambers is blocked by his female rival—"He and his mother had an affection for each other which was based on a respect for the other's essential selfishness." Or Hubert Langton, retiring head of chambers and once-great lawyer, losing his memory and control with age and bossed into increasing irrelevance by a daughter "in whom a certain sensitivity, acquired rather than innate, was at war with a natural authoritarianism."

James's people are wounded, compromised, familiar souls, whose quotidian frailties are exposed through an eye that is more sharp than generous, often witty but seldom funny. Around her central drama, James creates these smaller worlds with forensic precision, using incredible and melodramatic death to illustrate credible and movingly recognizable lives.

The one exception in A Certain Justice may be Adam Dalgliesh himself, the poet-detective well known to admirers of the James canon. Dalgliesh was always a feline and exacting figure, but here he comes close to being a token presence, appearing about a third of the way into the book and oddly distant and preoccupied thereafter. On the way to visit a suspect, Commander Dalgliesh (being an intellectual) is "struck by an imperative need to glimpse the sea," and once there experiences, somewhat bizarrely, "a tingling happiness, almost frightening in its physicality, that soul-possessing joy which is so seldom felt once youth has passed."

One suspects that the author is a touch tired of her veteran sleuth and may be preparing to put him out to grass: most likely a book-lined retirement, with a nice cup of Earl Grey and a consultative role in future mysteries.

In obedience to the classic crime-writing genre, James finally offers up the guilty party, resolving a complicated plot with impeccable logic. But there the symmetry ends, for the moral and emotional questions she asks do not admit of such neatness. "Human justice is necessarily imperfect," and in James's world there is no guiding hand of fairness to bring the criminal to the dock, the innocent to safety, the lost to redemption.

Langton, the old-fashioned lawyer with the addled mind trying to cling to a flawed system to which he has devoted a devoted life, still does not want to know who killed Venetia Aldridge, and finally he shuffles away from Dalgliesh, representative of some higher but still imperfect code. "Dalgliesh thought: He doesn't want to speak. He doesn't even want to see me." The two men are "carefully distanced" as they trudge off.

The image of a humbled law shutting out reality to preserve its rules and equanimity closes a book in which revenge is not quite sated and deserts are not always just. That may not be the most satisfying conclusion, but it contains a certain truth.