The Private Patient

The Private Patient (2008) is a crime novel by English author P. D. James, the fourteenth and last in her Adam Dalgliesh series.

Synopsis
In deepest Dorset, the once magnificent Cheverell Manor has been renovated and transformed into a plastic surgery clinic, run by the famous cosmetic practitioner George Chandler-Powell. Two days after Rhoda Gradwyn, an investigative journalist, arrives in the hope of having her almost lifelong facial scar removed, she's savagely murdered and Chandler-Powell finds his surgery under scrutiny from Dalgliesh and his team, who are soon caught in a race against time when another body shows up...

Reception
In a 2008 book review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin called the book an "exercise in impeccable detection", and wrote "James sets her mystery on comfortably familiar terrain and makes the most of its atmospherics. But the plotting of 'The Private Patient' is not up to this author’s diabolical best." Kirkus Reviews summarized it as "Middling work for the peerless James, a whodunit as deeply shadowed by mortality as all Dalgliesh’s cases ever since 'Shroud for a Nightingale'" Donna Rifkind of The Washington Post wrote, "[It's] not the most formidable example of this iconic author's work, but it's still pretty darn good."