(2008) Very good. A plastic surgery patient comes to a private clinic in the country to have a facial scar removed. Inexplicably, she is murdered and there appears to be no reason or suspect in the case. Adam Dlgliesh and his team of Kate and Benton are asked to come in and try to solve the murder. This is the last of the Dalgliesh series of which I read the last 5 over 16 years.KIRKUS: James's 18th novel revisits familiar groundĄan insular social setting disrupted by a shocking murderĂ‚ÂĄwith consummate artistry.For 34 years Rhoda Gradwyn has carried the legacy of her father's abuse in the form of a disfiguring facial scar. Now a distinguished investigative journalist, she decides to have it removed because, as she tells Harley Street plastic surgeon George Chandler-Powell, ?I no longer have need of it.? The operation, performed in the surgeon's private clinic in Cheverell Manor, is successful, but it still proves fatal for Rhoda, who's strangled the following night. The murder scene, as usual in James (The Lighthouse, 2005, etc.), is thick with likely suspects and motives. Rhoda's friend Robin Boyton, who recommended the clinic, is convinced that his cousins, assistant surgeon Marcus Westhall and his sister Candace, cheated Robin out of his rightful inheritance. Helena Haverland, the clinic's general administrator, is still smarting over her family's loss of Cheverell Manor to Chandler-Powell. Head nurse Flavia Holland is maddened by spurned love. Kitchen helper Robin Bateman is hiding a dire secret. Nor does anyone seem to mourn a woman who made her living by exposing unsavory secrets. Commander Adam Dalgliesh, called away from a meeting with his prospective father-in-law, and his colleagues uncover a series of red herrings as ritualistically as Hercule Poirot, but with a great deal more psychological nuance, before the killer, who could be practically anyone, is finally unmasked.Middling work for the peerless James, a whodunit as deeply shadowed by mortality as all Dalgliesh's cases ever since Shroud for a Nightingale (1971).

I enjoyed this entire series, but it's so very dark that I was a little bit glad when it was over. ( )

Odd to start out with #14 in a series and be able to say you enjoyed it. I liked the murder mystery. It was intricately woven, with each of the suspects having a lot of plausible reasons to commit the murder and real convictions about "who done it" held at bay until very near the end.

I felt less involved in the Commander and his squad, but that was natural, since this is a relationship that has been building for the reader since book one and book fourteen is obviously well into that relationship and I suspect coming to the end. For a book that was picked at random from a sale table, it was not disappointing at all. I had not read anything by James before, although I was well aware of her work. I will not hesitate to read her again. ( )

After thirty years, Rhoda Gradwyn has decided to get rid of the long facial scar on her left cheek. Something her father had given her at sixteen while he was drunk and angry. She had become very successful as an investigative journalist and felt it was now time for a change.

She chose to have the work done at Cheverell Manor in Dorset, Mr. Chandler-Powell’s private clinic (surgeons go by Mr. rather than Dr. in England). She was told there was no risk to her on the surgery. In about a week all would be done and she would be home. It didn’t turn out that way.

There are a number of secrets at the manor. Some that wind up connecting to Rhoda and cause her death.

Chandler-Powell had bought the manor from Sir Nicholas Cressett. His daughter works at the clinic/manor. There are the Westhalls, brother and sister, who live and work on the property. They have a connection to Robin Boyton, who is also a friend of Rhoda and stays in one of the cottages on the manor property. There is Sister Flavia Holland, the head nurse, who also has some nice curves. The Bostocks are the cooks for the manor. He has dreams of his own restaurant. They also live on the premises. Quite a nice selection of possible suspects, which is what they become, when Rhoda is found dead in her bed the morning following her surgery.

Commander Dalgliesh, of New Scotland Yard, is called in to investigate per orders from 10 Downing Street. Dalgleish finds there are secrets and past crimes that shade the current case. Not only does he have to unravel the current case, he has to unravel and connect up the old crimes to make sense of the current case.

Bit by bit, Dalgleish uncovers and puts together the pieces to get a full picture and solution to who, what, why and how Rhoda was murdered. ( )

The last Dalgliesh book, and she gave it an ending kind of ending. It read as though PD James would have preferred to just describe a lot of buildings and throw in a few diatribes about the Labor government, but she was willing to create an intricate mystery since that’s what the customers want. ( )