P. D. James continues to write very literate and interesting mysteries featuring her well-read inspector Adam Dalgliesh. This recent edition has a great story, although the motivations of the murderer left me disbelieving. His rationale just did not seem especially valid, but the scenarios and characters are complex and interesting. The setting for this novel is St. Anselm's, a small theological college on a lonely stretch of the Anglian coast, so isolated that a fallen tree on the only road to the college can effectively block all access to it. The students are housed in an old Victorian mansion with all sorts of nooks and crannies. Increasingly threatened by the financial burdens on the college, the local archdeacon wants to close the college -- he becomes one of the murder victims -- but his past ties with one of the teachers make his judgments suspect. All of the professors and some of the ordinands (those studying to become Anglican priests) have nefarious events in their past or antipathy toward one or other of the rest of the characters. A local police inspector is there for a while, recuperating from psychological problems, and he has reason to hate the archdeacon, an antipathy reciprocated because of the investigator’s investigation into the death of the archdeacon's first wife and his ongoingl certainty of the archdeacon's culpability. Dalgliesh becomes involved because he had been asked to investigate the ostensible suicide of one of the ordinands who had apparently killed himself by lying under an outcropping of sand and then causing it to collapse suffocating himself. Dalgliesh has nostalgic memories of the college, having spent some time there in his youth. By the end of the investigation, several others have been killed in order to hide a secret — and this is where the plot falls apart, I think — that would have, by necessity, have come out in any case. In a portrayal of human evil, James reveals a nasty mess of intertwined jealousy, greed, deceit, anger and revenge, not to ignore murder. The ultimate cause of the murders is the endowment that, if the college is closed, will pass to the remaining professors, or to the heir of the Arbuthnot estate. It gets wonderfully complicated, and James's nonpareil writing holds one enthralled right to the end despite my earlier caveat.