So the only PD James book I’ve read before this one was The Children of Men, and while I did like that one for a lot of reasons, it’s hardly preparatory to read a one-off sci fi novel 30 years into a writer’s career to try to figure out what their mystery writing is like.
So this one came across my Overdrive, and even though it’s the second in the series, I figured it was close enough. It’s a lot like the Martin Beck novels of Maj Slowall and Per Waloo in that it’s a very stripped down mystery with the facts, figures, and criminology, but it’s also quite hampered by the attempts it makes to add characterization and context-building for the detective himself. So the fact that the lead detective is a poet makes no real particular sense and is unimportant to the novel in any real way.
The biggest hangup this novel has is that it latches onto not so progressive psychological medical methodology (as the murder takes place in a hospital) and then uses some of that same bogus psychology to explain the crime. It’s not any different from plenty of currently written or just having been published crime fiction in that same way, but it also just means it’s not going to hold up, as they are not likely to hold up over time. Had PD James not become PD James, then this novel was not going to stick around much past the 1960s.
It does however have a pretty brutal murder. Someone gets stabbed with a chisel, which was so crazy that I had to look up to see if chisel meant something different in England from the US. It does not.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Murder-P-D-James/dp/B00AA2R4LG/ref=sr_1_5?crid=9YPC220ILCBN&keywords=a+mind+to+murder+pd+james&qid=1555422286&s=gateway&sprefix=a+mind+to+%2Caps%2C289&sr=8-5)