[In the following review, Robertson asserts that James's fans will not be disappointed with A Certain Justice.]

'Come off it, Piers! Oxford degree in theology? You're not a typical copper.' 'Do I have to be? Do you have to be?' Not in a P. D. James novel, you don't. This is the place where all our policeman are wonderful. [In A Certain Justice,] Inspector Piers the theologian and the deeply sensitive Constable Kate (who missed her vocation as a Jungian analyst) are helping our published poet Commander Dalgleish, the Yard's philosopher-in-residence, to crack a murder in the Temple. It is coppers like these (and Morse, of course) who make English detective novels so inherently unbelievable. But they read well, nonetheless. Since P. D. James is such a fine writer, does reality matter?

In this book more than most, perhaps it does. The plot is set so concretely in the legal profession—the Chambers rather than the Firm—that it invites comparison with Grisham and Turow and the American realist school of crime fiction, where gritty storytelling holds attention precisely because it does have the ring of truth (whatever it lacks in literary quality). Sadly, this novel's allegedly contemporary lawyers are set in a time-warp, somewhere between the Notable Trials series and an early episode of Rumpole of the Bailey.

Venetia Aldridge QC is a clever, cold-blooded careerist who 'gets her kicks defending people she thinks are guilty'. So it would serve her right if the underachieving daughter she dislikes does marry the murderer for whom Venetia has skilfully arranged a wrongful acquittal. But one night in the Middle Temple, just before she is likely to achieve the prize of becoming head of chambers, someone skills the QC with a single stab, and someone else puts a full-length wig on the corpse and splatters it with blood.

The problem for our police—a trio the Yard could field to win University Challenge—is that Venetia has so many colleagues with a motive to kill her. There is the QC rival for the position of head of chambers. There is a senior clerk, worried that Venetia will replace him with a practice manager. There is the attractive female pupil much admired by the men, whom Venetia will veto for a seat in chambers. There is the ambitious barrister who fears she will report him for professional misconduct and so delay his accession to silk, and there is his wife's favourite uncle (providentially, a barrister in the same chambers) who just might have helped the family fortunes by dispatching this sharptongued Assistant Recorder.

I know fiction is stranger than truth, but this is all too much. (The notion that anyone would kill to become head of chambers is especially risible.) Some of the law is a little shaky as well: the book opens with a trial meant to be a cliff-hanger, but since the prosecution pivots on a 'fleeting glance' identification the judge would, in real-time, have withdrawn it from the jury.

This matters only if we take crime fiction seriously. As fiction simpliciter, the book is further evidence that P. D. James is one of the most spine-chilling writers around. No other writer (except Ian McEwan) brings out the terror of nondescript places where bad things happen, be they suburban homes or courtrooms or building sites or the coastal reed-beds where A Certain Justice has its gripping denouement.

Much of the writing's impact comes from its bleak pessimism—what Enoch Powell identifies as the true Tory approach to human nature. 'All human seeking after the good, the harmonious life … is illusory,' thinks one character, identifying the book's theme. Its psychopaths are more sympathetic than its barristers, consumed by mean-minded rivalry and obsessive selfishness. These characters are too unbelievably horrid, but the capped tooth of middle-class English malice has seldom been better described.

The plot ebbs rather than flows, however, with an unconvincing character introduced towards the end to unveil its key events through the stilted device of a long letter to a priest, which takes up 22 pages in the book. If P. D. James really wishes to explore the ethically interesting notion of a barrister taking responsibility for the consequences of her professional actions, we need to have those actions described directly and through Venetia's own mind, not as a retrospective penned by an occasional observer.

Still, A Certain Justice will not disappoint P. D. James fans. This Life it is not (there is no sex), and it is no less accurate than that television programme about life in chambers circa 1997—by which, I mean, not very accurate at all. At least barristers are more appealing on the box than in the book.