Innocent Blood

⚖The case for it

A young woman discovers her birth parents are a murderer and his accomplice, and is then herself stalked by the victim's bereaved husband. James's most overtly literary novel, a meditation on identity, parenthood, guilt, and justice. It demonstrates that crime fiction and the psychological novel are the same form.

— the canon

✕The case against

James abandons the detective and the pace goes with him. Philippa is a heroine of studied coldness, hard to spend three hundred pages beside, and the plot depends on contrivances James would never have permitted Dalgliesh: a bereaved husband teaching himself surveillance, every clue cooperating. The class snobbery, always present in her work, here goes unchaperoned.

— the honest librarian