Unique settings are a PD James speciality, from a tower on a Dorset hilltop, a nuclear power station on the East Anglian coast and a particular London church to, in this book, an offshore island used as a high-security hideout for VIPs. The earnest viewpoint is combined with playful use of the conventions of the mystery game, a formal pattern in which suspects come forward in turn, as the detectives scrupulously consider a series of clues and motives. The Lighthouse is a whodunit which takes murder seriously this writer never lets her readers forget that death is no joke. Her people, places and plots are as artful as ever and her dialogue, having always been uncolloquially correct and expletive-free, does not date. At 85 she is still a working peer, more actively involved with the world than most authors. Luckily her successor PD James presents no such problems.
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