SOURCE: "Going Postal," in New York Times Book Review, December 7, 1997, p. 26.

In the following review, Macintyre states that James resolves the plot in A Certain Justice, but ends the novel with moral and emotional questions left unanswered.

For her latest murderous mise en scene, [A Certain Justice,] P. D. James takes us to a set of lawyers' chambers in London's Middle Temple, the heart of the English legal establishment, a closed and comfortable world encrusted with centuries of respectability, precedent and reasoned argument. There we find Venetia Aldridge, a celebrated and widely detested barrister, propped at her desk with a neat hole in her heart left by a letter opener, a sharpened replica of the sword of justice; on her head is a judge's horsehair wig dripping with fresh blood that, it swiftly becomes apparent, does not come from the veins of the late and unlamented Venetia Aldridge...