This is, James writes, ''a lucrative game according to complicated rules . . . Aldridge 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. She minds only that she gets him off, and so, with a typically virtuoso courtroom performance, she does. The moral conundrum at the heart of James's tale lies in the double-entendre of its title. Most of us have to live with the results of what we do.
Actions have consequences. . . .
In less subtle hands these might lapse into cliche or caricature, but instead James leaves the lingering sense that each life is a separate embryonic novel, possibly irrelevant to ''the case'' but individually real. James's people are wounded, compromised, familiar souls, whose quotidian frailties are exposed through an eye that is more sharp than generous, often witty but seldom funny. Around her central drama, James creates these smaller worlds with forensic precision, using incredible and melodramatic death to illustrate credible and movingly recognizable lives. The one exception in ''A Certain Justice'' may be Adam Dalgliesh himself, the poet-detective well known to admirers of the James canon. Dalgliesh was always a feline and exacting figure, but here he comes close to being a token presence, appearing about a third of the way into the book and oddly distant and preoccupied thereafter.