Death of an Expert Witness

P. D. James's Death of an Expert Witness takes Adam Dalgliesh to Hoggatt's Laboratory, a forensic science center in the East Anglian fens. The laboratory is already examining a violent death when one of its own senior biologists, Edwin Lorrimer, is found murdered. A workplace devoted to producing objective evidence becomes the scene whose relationships and procedures must themselves be investigated.

Lorrimer's exacting manner has created resentments among colleagues, but professional hostility is only one layer of the case. Dalgliesh and his team must understand laboratory routines, private histories, and the authority granted to expert testimony. The setting makes contamination, timing, and access as important as spoken alibis.

Read the mystery for its patient attention to institutions: science can clarify material facts, yet scientists remain vulnerable to pride, fear, and divided loyalties. The fen landscape adds physical isolation to an already enclosed professional world. This overview establishes the two deaths and the laboratory inquiry and withholds the culprit, the decisive forensic connection, and the final explanation.