a game that was sometimes won at the cost of a human life.''Īldridge shows no evidence that she cares whether Garry Ashe, an intelligent young psychopath as adept at the game as she, murdered his prostitute aunt in a grotty and condemned council house. This is, James writes, ''a lucrative game according to complicated rules.

For Aldridge, the distinction appears moot, for the more compelling the evidence of evildoing, the greater the challenge to introduce reasonable doubt in the jury's mind, and the higher the professional rewards of success.

Under English law, a barrister need not be convinced of a client's innocence and must withdraw only if certain of his or her guilt. She exploits the weakness of others with glinting disdain, seeing the law not as a mechanism of equity but as a test of intellectual cunning and dramatic talent. Aldridge is single-minded, arrogant, callous and utterly determined to further her career. We know what is coming to Venetia Aldridge, Queen's Counsel, from the third sentence of ''A Certain Justice,'' when the author notes that the lawyer has ''four weeks, four hours and fifty minutes left of life.'' Over those four weeks, James assembles the composing elements of her doomed character, the childhood and profession that have made her so successful - and so repellent. ''A necessary physical function'' sounds like the sort of euphemism one would find in the rule book of an English boarding school circa 1930, but it is precisely the contrast between such external fastidiousness and the complex, sometimes depraved internal lives of James's characters that gives her books such emotive power. obviously regarded praying much as they did a necessary physical function, something best done in private,'' she writes. There are few more English writers than Baroness James of Holland Park. Here are intimations of desecration, of calm outward lives torn apart by inner violence: the genteel juxtaposed with the gruesome. This macabre montage is vintage James: the language of ancient place and tradition - temples, chambers, oak paneling, afternoon tea - colliding with a grisly modern murder, inexplicably staged and defying logic. There we find Venetia Aldridge, a celebrated and widely detested barrister, propped at her desk with a neat hole in her heart left by a letter opener, a sharpened replica of the sword of justice on her head is a judge's horsehair wig dripping with fresh blood that, it swiftly becomes apparent, does not come from the veins of the late and unlamented Venetia Aldridge.

James takes us to a set of lawyers' chambers in London's Middle Temple, the heart of the English legal establishment, a closed and comfortable world encrusted with centuries of respectability, precedent and reasoned argument. For her latest murderous mise en scene, P.

Going postal book