It also had my hated trope: miscommunication problems that can be solved if people could just talk for 5 minutes.

This is also my #1 most hated trope, alongside "reasonably competent people have to be incredibly stupid for the plot to work".

That particular P.D. James novel sounds awful but I've already quit reading books by her because of her bad case of protagonist-centred morality (people who agree with the protagonist are good, whatever the protagonist does is good or at least for good reasons, people who pose the slightest disagreement are obviously bad.) This sounds like a more extreme case of it.