The Skull Beneath the Skin (Cordelia Gray, #02)

"Nothing is more disappointing than the poor work of a good  craftsman. P. D. James, hailed as Christie's successor and in some ways an abler hand at characterization, has given steady proof of her mastery of the genre. She even created in Cordelia Gray a likeable and credible woman investigator. Here she brings her back, but makes her act like a bewildered maiden, though she heads a London detective agency. Besides, the plot is full of unlikelihoods, including the reason for the island setting and the crime itself." - A Catalogue of Crime
In a 1982 book review, Julian Symons of the New York Times wrote "'The Skull Beneath the Skin' is perhaps an acknowledgment that she had reached too far, a deliberate step back in the direction of orthodoxy. It is a  disappointment to the extent that the criminal results don't flow as they should from the stated motives, but this is
still an absorbing story, paced and written with fine calculation, a work quite beyond the scope of more than a very few of her contemporaries."