It's not that she's outstanding acting wise, but she is so compelling in the role with a mixture of cheerful disposition and calculating manipulation she portrays that can switch at a moment's notice. Overall this is a well acted mystery that starts well but the death of one of it's main characters impacts somewhat on the remainder of the episodes. You know you can't really trust her and her character is not particularly nice, but with Thomson in the role you can't help liking her in some strange way.

Cover Her Face: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation: A BBC Cover Her Face: BBC Radio 4 Full-cast Dramatisation: A BBC

It also features a couple of topless scenes involving Marsden and Frazer that was likely meant to add a bit of phwoar factor in but is more likely to see women (and men) running screaming from the room at the sight of such skinny pasty bodies. But my favourite has to be Julian Glover's beautifully judged performance as Felix Hurst, a thoroughly decent man in love with a woman who cannot love him back. Deborah later visits Stephen at the hospital where he works and sees her brother talking with Sally. BBC Radio 4 Extra continues its celebration this week of the centenary of the birth of renowned crime fiction novelist, PD James.The pace is deliberate, the characterization of the members of an English county family very well done, and the central character of Sally Jupp – a servant girl with imagination and a love of power – most unusual but compelling. Cover Her Face was adapted for television in 1985, starring Roy Marsden, Phyllis Calvert and Mel Martin. And her actions are constantly shifty, including her secret meetings with village lad Derek Pullen (Robert Glenister), who gives her letters postmarked Venezuela.

Cover Her Face by P. D. James | Waterstones Cover Her Face by P. D. James | Waterstones

Despite this it has enough though to keep you interested, it has some beautiful scenery and it remains an absorbing murder mystery. Rupert Frazer's Stephen Maxie, however, is so objectionable that you can't help but hope that someone punches him on the nose before the end of the mystery. But the arrival of Sally Jupp to help housekeeper Martha in the kitchen (a formiddable Jean Heywood) shakes up the whole place in ways they never imagined. Serving at table is Sally Jupp, chosen from a local refuge for unmarried mothers to help in the house by Mrs Maxie and now living in with her infant son, Jimmy. Outside she bumps into old friend Stavros Veludis, a Greek cypriot who greets her warmly enough but seems to be running away from someone.

Martha has been using them to drug Sally's cocoa so that she would oversleep, be discredited and eventually dismissed. She had pretended to be unmarried because revealing her marriage would have jeopardised her husband's job and she liked to 'play with people'. There are so many off shoots that are happening in the village or in Dalgliesh's drug racketeering investigations that these episodes are never dull. When Sally is brought in by Stephen during the fateful dinner, it is Eleanor who pointedly informs her that staff members' place are in the kitchen, in a hint to her that she is not part of THEIR circle. In a 1966 book review, Anthony Boucher of The New York Times wrote "This is a literate and not unpromising first novel, but modeled firmly upon the detective story of 30 years ago at its dullest.