P.D. James is an esteemed mystery novelist whose 1980 book Innocent Blood became a mainstream best seller. Her fictions often center on guilty secrets and the way the past reverberates into the present. In The Maul and the Pear Tree, James applies her narrative and analytic talents to the actual: the Ratcliffe Highway murders that took place in early-l9th century London. Although the seven killings in two merchant households were widely publicized and later inspired Thomas De Quincey's essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts," James and her collaborator, Police Historian T.A. Critchley, found that few researchers had...
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