As in all of James's works, place is very important. Here she takes the reader to an East Anglian village bordering the fens, where nature is as important as Hogatt's Forensic Laboratory, located in an old Palladian mansion. James places great importance on documenting her materials. Her own experience in hospitals and in police work are most helpful in describing the lab. She is personally interested in church and domestic Georgian architecture. The story is built around an old mansion and its artistically important but now abandoned Wren chapel, "an isolated building so small and perfect that it looked like an architect's model precisely set in a fabricated landscape, or an elegant ecclesiastical folly, justifying itself only by its classical purity . . ."

Plot is crucial in a detective story.

Some of James's novels tend to lag around the middle. Death of an Expert Witness moves rather steadily, although it...