"He ought to be writing thrillers," reflects the heroine of "Innocent Blood" about the novel's putative villain. "He had the mind of a thriller writer, obsessive, guilt-ridden, preoccupied with trivia. He had lived too long with thoughts of death." Whether or not this derogatory judgment is shared by the author of "Innocent Blood," it is certainly consistent with what she has done in her latest novel. For after writing seven detective thrillers featuring Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard and establishing her as one of the most esteemed practitioners of the genre in the English-speaking world,… P. D. James has burst the bounds of her territory.

In "Innocent Blood" she has gone far beyond the conventional limits of the whodunnit—or in this case the willhedoit—and written a novel that is subtle, rich, allusive and positively Shakespearean in its manipulation of such symbols as blindness, bastardy and flowers...