Her newest mystery, Devices and Desires, is P. D. James at better than her best.

That this British writer has long transcended classification as a writer of books of mystery and detection goes without saying. That she is a first-class novelist has come clear over some 30 years and is reaffirmed by her 11th work. What "gives any mystery writer the claim to be regarded as a serious novelist," she wrote in 1983, is "the power to create [a] sense of place and to make it as real to the reader as his own living room—and then to people it with characters who are suffering men and women, not stereotypes to be knocked down like dummies in the final chapter." By hewing to this standard with literary flair and an eye as perceptive as her heart, she has established primacy in her field.

P. D. James has placed herself in the tradition of Wilkie Collins, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but my own thought is that if Anthony Trollope or George Eliot or Miss James's own beloved Jane Austen had turned a hand to murder or mystery, she would have her heredity. She offers her readers the satisfactions of an artfully constructed, beautifully written story of flesh-and-blood individuals in a time and place we get to know as well as its inhabitants. Not, mind you, that she ignores the conventions of the mystery story: the crime, the clues, the suspects and the puzzlement are there, but so absorbing a read does she offer that final revelations seem almost a bonus. And this time out, with the revelations and resolution, Miss James has taken a risk—and taken it successfully.

Devices and Desires—the title, borrowed from the general confession in the Book of Common Prayer, was also used as a section heading in her last work, A Taste for Death (1986)—brings back Adam Dalgliesh, one of her unique creations, a detective neither accented, eccentric nor renegade, now the head of a special squad at New Scotland Yard, a renowned policemen and an acclaimed poet. But in the course of this new outing and its risky resolution, Dalgliesh is destined to feel "the frustrating involvement with a case which would never be his yet from which it was impossible to distance himself."

The hook—that Jamesian opening sentence—is there, too: "The Whistler's fourth victim was his youngest, Valerie Mitchell, aged fifteen years, eight months and four days, and she died because she missed the 9.40 bus from Easthaven to Cobb's Marsh." Thus we are introduced to the first of the "suffering men and women"—and children—who will concern us. The Whistler's purlieu is Norfolk, and four days later Dalgliesh is drawn into the story when he takes off from London for a two-week vacation on the Norfolk coast. His destination is the remote (and fictional) headland of Larksoken, where he will settle the affairs of his recently deceased Aunt Jane, his last living relative, who has left him a historic windmill and house there and £750,000.

Dalgliesh, a sensitive and compassionate observer, is initially our key to the Larksoken community, its inhabitants as varied as their scattered dwellings (which date from a restored 16th-century martyr's cottage to a tacky trailer), its skyline marked by the ruins of an abbey and dominated by the Larksoken Nuclear Power Station, its rhythms underlined by the sea and the wind and the chill of a serial killer at large.

Through Dalgliesh and on our own we encounter a fascinating mix of people: an enigmatic cooking writer and her scientist brother, who is the chief of the power station; a muddled antinuclear activist and the voluptuous young unmarried mother who shares his trailer; power-station executives and underlings with ambitions and aberrations of their own; a widow whose teaching career has been destroyed by the "fashionable orthodoxies" of race relations (must a blackboard be called a chalkboard?); an icy beauty involved with an "unprepossessing wimp"; an alcoholic painter and his four motherless children. Sibling relationships with figurative as well as literal blood ties, a variety of sexual relationships, the pros and cons of nuclear power, religion and religiosity are explored and exposed.

Dalgliesh serves too as our link to Terry Rickards, a long-ago London colleague, now head of the Norfolk homicide branch, who seeks him out as a sounding board. He is, in Dalgliesh's view, a "conscientious and incorruptible detective of limited imagination and somewhat greater intelligence," and their relationship is both territorial and prickly when the Whistler strikes again and closer to home, his fifth victim a power-station secretary. And when still another victim, a power-station administrator, is killed in what may or may not be a copycat murder, Dalgliesh, discovering the body, qualifies as both witness and suspect.

Preoccupied with the detritus of his beloved aunt's life; bemused by the childhood memories it evokes and pondering his own future as an independently wealthy man, Dalgliesh is indeed part poet. But he is in larger part policeman, a seasoned investigator who, on another's turf, can still recognize a major clue, know how to deal with intelligence operatives in two more deaths, gain insight into a power-station scientist's suicide, perform heroic physical feats in a crisis and finally make an informed "guess" at the solutions even when the cases are officially given "open verdicts."

But his is only a guess. The risk that P. D. James has taken here is in letting readers see with their own, rather than the detective's, eyes and know more than Dalgliesh, Rickards or the intelligence agents can know or learn. We and the author share the terror of an innocent running "smiling towards the horror of her death," the irony of a schemer with time only to say "I'm sorry. I'm sorry" as the end comes, the suspense of "the silent watcher waiting" for a victim, the ice of a murderer's summing up: "I did what I had to do, and it was worth it." We share a knowledge with Miss James of secrets that are kept, of virtue and principle, of hatred on the face and evil in the heart.

While it has the richness of a classical novel, this topical tale is told in a taut time framework and unfolds in the near cinematic scenes that are Miss James's style. This is why her work translates so well to film. (A Taste for Death, her fifth novel to be televised here on public television, will come to "Mystery!" in March.)

If there is a minor flaw in Devices and Desires, it is that for the whodunit fan there is small question of who in Larksoken is marked for murder, though the identity of the murderer, albeit impeccably clued for us, comes as a shocker. But, as always with P. D. James, the whodunit element is the lagniappe, so interesting are her characters, so absorbing her depiction of time and place, so rich the texture of the tale she tells. She has not failed us, and she has exceeded herself.