![]() ![]() ![]() Blending the traditional detective story with the psychological thriller, she explored themes of obsession, revenge, neglect, ambition, morality, greed, deceit, identity, the existence of evil, and the implacable force of the past, all in prose that was at once elegant and graceful, sometimes tinged with dry humor, always filled with remarkable power. “We none of us know another human being so well that we can be absolutely sure about him,” she wrote in Innocent Blood (1980), and she peopled the novels she wrote from 1962 to 2011 with an astonishing array of characters, each one-even the smallest-etched with care as their lives unraveled under the revealing trauma of a murder inquiry. It was just that fallibility that most fascinated her. “Crime writers today know only too well that corruption can lie at the very heart of law, that not all policemen are invariably honest, that murder is a contaminating crime which changes all those who come into touch with it, in fiction as in real life, and that although there may be-indeed must be-a solution at the end of the detective novel and a kind of justice, it can only be the fallible justice of men” ( Time to Be in Earnest, 1999). ![]()
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