Oddly enough, it is the very qualities that make P. D. James's detective stories so good that undermine Innocent Blood, her first "serious" novel. The literacy that sparkles through An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, the psychological insight that renders the nurses of Shroud for a Nightingale so pitiably familiar, indeed, the technical ability that has informed all seven of her mysteries are here overevident, too obviously employed in the service of an end that remains obscure.

The biggest problem is Philippa Palfrey, the eighteen-year-old heroine of the book. Unable to remember anything that happened to her before her eighth year, when she was adopted by a famous sociologist and his mousy wife, she is cold, self-absorbed, overeducated, and generally unpleasant. She is also prone to committing improbable acts, such as setting up housekeeping with her natural mother, a child murderer of whom she has no memory and...