In the following essay, Maxfield analyzes the character of Cordelia Gray and asserts that at the end of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, there is still room for growth of the character.

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...

Miss P. D. James is the leading present-day practitioner of the feminine character novel that is also a detective story. By and large she is, indeed, the only member of her clan who has substantial claims to rank alongside [Dorothy] Sayers and [Margery] Allingham. She writes and plots, usually, with a gem-like clarity that compels both attention and admiration. Unfortunately in [An Unsuitable Job For a Woman] the gem is flawed. Private detection is indeed no job for the dear little thing who is employed to ...

[An Unsuitable Job for a Woman] shows what a suitable job it is for P. D. James to be a mystery writer. Her fifth book honorably carries on the tradition of the classic English mystery—literate, intelligent, with shrewdly observed characters and sound plotting—as she deals with contemporary university students during a summer at Cambridge, and the puzzling suicide of a young man…. P. D. James is a mystery novelist of substance, an acute observer of scene and character, and she writes wi...