Shroud for a Nightingale (Adam Dalgliesh Mysteries Book 4)

This is an early CID Adam Dalgliesh of the Scotland Yard mystery that opens with a nurse, Miss Beale, an Inspector of Nurse Training Schools to the General Nursing Council goes to Heatheringfield, England, out in the country where the John Carpenter Hospital has been since 1792. The nursing school is in the Nightingale House, an old haunted Victorian House that, in many people's opinions, is quite inappropriate for a nursing school in that the windows, while pretty, do not allow enough light in, and it is drafty and the rooms are not the optimal sizes for what is required. Miss Beale is quite good at her job and at having the ability to size up people rather accurately.

Now, let me take a moment to explain the medical community in England at that time. I have no idea how it is now, but if you do, please feel free to comment below. In nursing, you go from Nurse to Sister, if you head up a ward or become a teacher, and then, if you are lucky and become head of the hospital nursing staff, you are called a Matron. The highest a non-nurse can achieve is a surgeon, which are referred to as Mr. A Dr. is a step below that and is generally a simple general practitioner. Those that are a Mr. look down upon those that are mere Drs. as being inferior and less knowledgeable.

Miss Beale is there with Sister Rolfe, a middle-aged nurse there, Mr. Courtney-Briggs, a surgeon, and Matron Taylor, who has a reputation for excellence to the point that some wonder why she doesn't head up a place in London. Some people, thinks Miss Beale, may not want to live in London. The clinical instructor, Sister Gearing, is filling in as a teacher because a bout of flu has hit the hospital and many nurses are in bed with it, including Nurse Fallon, who was supposed to act as patient for the demonstration of insertion of a gastric tube and pouring what will be milk for their purposes down the throat. Nurse Pearce is instead acting as the patient and Miss Beale notices that she seems rather scared, but later puts it down to not liking being the patient when others inform her that she is always like that. The other student nurses present are: Nurse Dakers, a conscientious girl who knew her facts and was hard working; the Burnt twins, who were performing the procedure and were seen as rather competent; Nurse Goodale, whom Miss Beale sees as quite an excellent student; Nurse Pardoe, a girl who is too pretty for her own good; Nurse Harper, a sullen girl.

As soon as the milk goes down the tube and hits Nurse Pearce's stomach, she jumps up gagging and Matron Taylor yanks the tube from her throat. However, it is too late. Even with all the medical help right there, she dies of poisoning from the disinfectant wash that had been put in the milk bottle. No one knows what to make of this. Was it a murder attempt, and if so upon whom? Nurse Fallon was supposed to be the patient, but everyone seems to have known that she was in the hospital with the flu. Someone did see her that morning running from the school, which is odd, considering she had a temperature of 103 degrees. What could she possibly have needed so badly that she had to come back? Nurse Pearce was not very well liked. She was rather pious and holier-than-thou. It wasn't that she was religious; you could accept that about a person, but rather that she saw herself as a judge over others. She was known to have blackmailed others and believed in the punishment fitting the crime.

The police believe it was a complete accident and do nothing. Nurse Harper leaves. She is engaged to be married and her father was only indulging her by letting her go to nursing school when she was never going to practice. Then, on the night that Nurse Fallon returns from the hospital, the twins wake up to go and get a drink of cocoa at around 2am and see Sister Bremfett, the ward nurse who is known to drag patients kicking and screaming from the jaws of death, whether they want it or not, and takes it as a personal affront when a patient dies. She has just come from the hospital where one of Mr. Courtney-Briggs's patients had a relapse and had to have surgery, so she went to set the patient up for the night. They also notice the light under Fallon's door and think about asking her for a cup of cocoa, but realize that Fallon, a private person, might not appreciate a disturbance.

The next morning at breakfast, no one has seen Fallon, so Nurse Drakers goes up to check on her and discovers her with her empty whiskey glass in her hand, dead from poison. Everyone believes it to be a suicide, especially when it is discovered that she is three months pregnant. The police call in Scotland Yard anyway, just to cover themselves, as two deaths, so close to each other have occurred at Nightingale House. Dalgliesh arrives and does not believe this to be the case, but that both girls were murdered. Some even try to convince him that Fallon was the one to poison Pearce and in a fit of guilt, committed suicide.

James writes serious mysteries, but this one has a very hilarious scene in it that had me about falling off the couch with laughter. Matheson, the Sargent who is working with Dalgliesh on this case is sent to interview an older woman who might have information relevant to the case. She is about to go out to a special ballroom dance hosted by her class. To get the information he has to go as her partner. It is lucky that he is a rather good ballroom dancer. As the evening wears on, she refuses to give him information. Then the spotlight dance comes, and she is the Silver Award winner. He has had a few to drink and is ticked off at her, so he decides to have fun with the dance and mess around with it. When he realizes how much this dance means to her, he tells her to start talking or she'll end up on the floor. The more she talks, the better he dances. I do not think I've ever seen a cop get information from someone this way before.

The more Dalgliesh investigates this crime, the more secrets he uncovers. Recent ones, as well as ones from long ago. Which ones are the important ones? Was Pearce killed because of her blackmailing schemes and was Fallon killed by the father of her child, who may be the surgeon, a man she had an affair with her first year? This house was already haunted by one ghost, no it seems two more have joined it. Is the killer finished are they just getting started?

Quotes
This, after all, was the commonest, the most banal of personal tragedies. You loved someone. They didn’t love you. Worse, still, in defiance of their own best interests and to the destruction of your peace, they loved another. What would half the world’s poets and novelists do without this universal tragicomedy?
--P. D. James (Shroud For a Nightingale p143)
You can’t run a nurse training school like a psychiatric unit. I’m not going to be blamed. People here are supposed to be sane, not homicidal maniacs.
--P. D. James (Shroud For a Nightingale p 221-2)
You men like to make things so complicated.
--P. D. James (Shroud For a Nightingale p 239)

Shroud for a Nightingale (1971) was undoubtedly P.D. James’ most accomplished novel to this point in her career. Set in Nightingale House, a nursing school on the grounds of a community hospital, it involves the investigation into the deaths of two students by Adam Dalgleish, James’ series detective.

This is a very complex mystery and James makes excellent use of her knowledge of the internal workings of the British healthcare system as she had by this point put in more than two decades working for a London hospital board. She also puts a premium on delving into the psychologies and motivations of the various characters, including Dalgleish, who is much more than the reader’s point person to save the mystery.

There was one incident late in the book that I thought smacked of detective fiction hackwork but overall this is an excellent and highly sophisticated thriller.

Shroud for a Nightingale was first published in 1971. The book is another in the series of detective police procedural novels featuring Inspector Adam Dalgliesh. James is adept at building tension as we explore the lives of her three dimensional characters. Except for a doctor the cast is made up of the nurses and their supervisors at the nursing school.
The Plot: Nightingale House is located next to John Carpendar's rural hospital. It is where student nurses are housed and have training in the fine art of caring for others. The House has a horrible history including a bizarre murder in the high Victorian age. During the course of a morning experiment a young nurse named Pearce dies horribly. Soon afterwards another nurse named Fallon is found poisoned in her bedroom. It is discovered in a post-mortem examination that she was pregnant.
The book features many interesting characters and takes a plot twist almost impossible to discover. Are the two murders linked? What effect does the past have on the present crimes? Who can one trust? All these are questions Dalgliesh and his team must discover if the foul crimes are to be accounted for.
Any P.D. James is written with elegance, wit and an examination of human sin and moral responsibility. This is true of this book. Read it and savor English murder fiction at its very best. Highly recommended!

Adam Dalgliesh, P.D. James' signature detective, is a consummate sleuth, able to use his intelligence to solve the most puzzling of crimes. "Shroud For a Nightingale", only the fourth bok to have featured Dalgliesh, is a bit dated, but it offers a case that Dalgliesh is able to solve but may find impossible to prove. It is a classic closed-scene murder mystery, with the few suspects living together in a place where privacy is closely guarded.

Nightingale House, an old mansion, is in use at John Carpendar Hospital as the dormitory of nurses in training and the Sister nurses in charge of them. On the morning of a General Nursing Council inspection, a student demonstration goes horribly wrong; while demonstrating how to do intragastric feeding on one of their fellow nurses, the students and observers watch as the young nurse screams in agony, poisoned to death. Was it an accident or murder? That answer is surely cleared up when another young nurse is found dead in her bed, a possible suicide, but Dalgliesh is called in, and he knows for certain that these two murders are connected. And that quite possibly, the mystery surrounding Nightingale House goes further back than these two murders.

P.D. James has crafted an ingenious mystery in this fourth novel, although it has some similarities to a later Dalgliesh mystery, "Original Sin". The first murder is almost too gruesomely described, setting the stage for the twists and turns that follow. "Shroud For a Nightingale" is a fast-paced mystery, but shows signs of being dated in its precise descriptions of nursing uniforms and medical jargon. The fact that Adam Dalgliesh is not quite yet fully formed as a character is evident, and he makes a fitting comment about fictional detectives, yet it is still a trademark enjoyable P.D. James.

I discovered Ms. James with "A Certain Justice" and have set my task to reading her entire oeuvre. In Shroud she first exhibits her wonderful gift for portraying big egos, a gift that made "A Certain Justice" such a fun read. In this case, the egos are embodied in a surgeon and supervising nurses. Apparently the British nursing profession in the day had a very strict hierarchy--strange to this American reviewer who is used to encountering nurses dressed in pyjamas who are the very soul of casual. Dalgliesh has a healthy ego himself, deservedly so, and is often at war with himself to control it, which makes for excellent interactions that are handled with the skill that make these mysteries so enjoyable.

In short, nurses start ending up dead and Inspector Dalgliesh must come and sort out the mess. The resolution is appropriately cerebral and satisfying. As murder is effectively the work of a person willing to let their own ego control the lives of others, the device of writing big egos into the story makes an excellent background for such a mystery. It takes smarts to commit a crime worthy of Dalgliesh--a fact that is surprisingly lost on many crime authors who run their characters through disappointingly banal events.

This fourth book in the series represents a big leap forward--easily as good as the first and much better than the second and third. It is representative work from author now confident of her superior abilities and who is willing to exercise the effort to craft an intelligent and intricate mystery.

I recently discovered P.D. James and, always in search of a good mystery, I've borrowed three from the local library. This is the second James mystery I've listened to and her style in both is similar; genteel, pleasant, slow-paced but intriguing. Hers are what you would call "cosies," I guess.

Although the exact time of this story's setting is never indicated, it seems to be late 1960s/early 1970s. It takes place at a boarding nursing school in the English countryside not far from London; when this claustrophobic world of the nursing sisters and their students all living in close proximity is rocked by the sudden deaths of two nursing students, detective Adam Dalgleish from Scotland Yard is called in.

As I said, the pacing is slow and yet the book never loses its interest. James creates a cast of varied and interesting characters, each with enough foibles and secrets of their own to make them likely suspects. Even one of the detectives was morally questionable enough to make him pretty dislikeable. The book shifts points of view quite a bit, which helped to give insight into the various characters.

What really saved this book for me was the excellent narration. Given that this is a pretty low-budget production -- I could often hear bumps in the background and the narrator turning her pages -- I was quite surprised at just how good the narrator was.

P.D. James doesn't "rock my world;" nevertheless, her mysteries (at least the two I've listened to so far) are entertaining enough to interest me in listening to more.

Detective Chief-Inspector Adam Dalgleish is investigating the suspicious deaths of two nursing students at Nightingale House. Given the time and circumstance of both poisonings, it appears that a fellow student or one of the nursing instructors had something to do with it, or did they?

As usual, P.D. James weaves subtle clues into complex relationships that take time to reveal, but with this book, I didn't mind. Although I found the narrative too plodding in Cover Her Face, it works much better in Shroud for a Nightingale. It could be that the characters's relationships had more depth and intrigue than in the earlier book. Certainly, the pall James slowly casts over Nightingale House makes the setting more intriguing. Also, there is better control over point of view in this book. I didn't learn much more about Dalgleish, but as James fans know, it's the deliciously slow revelations that make her plots and characters so appealing.

A Murder occurs during a nurses training demonstration. From that moment, you will be committed to the story. This story is a wonderful classic British who-dun-it. But it is so much more than that. Like all P.D. James novels, you'll find yourself caught up by the characters as layer by layer their good and bad intentions are revealed. The author never designs her novels with cardboard characters. Each player is complex, usually with faults, but so human and fallible, they are never one dimensional villians. This book stands out among all of her novels for two reasons. One is the atmosphere she creates, the claustrophic tense nurses training house, surrrounded by storms, driving rain, and falling tress. This all contributes to the high tension maintained throughout. The second reason is the mystery's solution. One of her most shocking and intense endings This is an outstanding book. If youre lucky...read it while snowed in with the phone lines down, and refuse to let the world outside interrupt theis intense and wonderful reading experience.

Adam Dalgliesh investigates the murders of two young student nurses at Nightingale House, the former by intra-gastric poisoning, the second by nicotine poisoning. His detective work leads him into a chilling world of deception, long-buried secrets, repressed sexuality, and blackmail among an almost exclusively female list of suspects.
This is James at her most provocative, her most intriguing, and her most thrilling. The plot is one of her most brilliantly conceived--not only are there plenty of well-laid clues and red herrings, but the murderer's true identity comes as a surprising twist. James' plot construction is even more sound than usual--everything fits perfectly. But anyone who reads a James novel knows that there's more to her books than just a satisfying mystery. She offers the reader a lot to think about--the motive behind the murders is both shocking and thought-provoking, and Dalgliesh is written with great sensitivity and complexity as a human being! . His subordinate, Sergeant Masterson, is a rather unsavory but interesting character, and the suspects are all extremely well-developed and vividly drawn. The setting, a dark, lonely nurse training school with a frightening history, creates atmosphere and adds suspense to an already suspenseful plot.
Read this book--you won't be disappointed.

When a third year nursing student is playing patient in a demonstration at Nightingale, she is horribly murdered.
Ah, but she wasn't supposed to be the patient that day. Was this a murder gone wrong, an accident, and will the killer strike again? Inspector Dagliesh is called in to interview the nursing students. Of course, they all have their secrets, and one of their secrets may be worth killing for.

Our mystery group enjoyed discussing this crime and the quality of P.D. James' writing. This is a fun, classic kind of mystery. If you would enjoy a crime set in a nursing school, you would probably enjoy this one. 4.5 stars

Detective stories are said to be good indicators of how society changes over the years and this is shown clearly in the wide time-span of P.D. James' Adam Dalgleish series. In this early book, "Shroud for a Nightingale", we are back to a National Health Service which had hardly changed for decades and was certainly quite a few years from the "new, improved" manager led modern version.

Nurses are still living in training schools and the book opens with a practical demonstration of naso-gastric feeding with a student nurse acting as patient and an assessor from the GNC (General Nursing Council) present to mark student training at the hospital. Toilet cleaner has been subsitutued for the milky drink expected and, not surprisingly, Nurse Pearce dies in agony. It is not until a second death amongst the nurses that Adam Dalgleish is called in but this is an early version of that authoritative figure and his support staff is not the reliable team of his later books.

Again, this book is Golden Age in tone and not very like the later rich and complex stories but a good puzzle and an interesting read.

This is an interesting work, though not one of James' best (I recommend "The Black Tower" or "The Skull Beneath the Skin" for that). The setting was great, a spooky Victorian mansion converted into a nursing school - this choice of location provided plenty of atmosphere and a restricted list of suspects.
The plot was well constructed, with the clues spaced just right, although I feel that James did cheat in a couple places. I dislike her tactic of having a character ask a question of another character, then not letting us see the answer, in order to keep from us information that the protagonist now knows. She did that in at least one place here and I find it annoying. The loose ends are tied up neatly and there's a surpising and very well done epilogue.
The characterization is where James falls down a bit. This is one of her early Dalgliesh books, and I think it shows, as most of the characters are more sketches than real persons. A big revelation about one character's past, near the end of the book, comes as something of a "so what?", since we don't really care about the character. Nurse Goodale was the only one I felt really stood out as a person. Even Dalgliesh seems to swing between supercilious and nasty, and he doesn't come off as a character a reader would care to spend more time with.
These flaws aside, I'd glady recommend this to any fan of the series, although it's not a good introduction for a non-fan ("A Mind to Murder" is perhaps best for that). Not on par with her best, but pretty good overall.

Dalgliesh successfully plods his way through interviews and backgrounds of the suspects, in a mystery that hinges on timing and relationships. It is a good puzzle, well presented and with entertaining conflict between characters. The pace is comfortable, a restful read. My one gripe is that I found the reason for the murders and a suicide hard to swallow.

A well-plotted detective story with more than a hint of the thriller to it, it rises well above the run of the mill books of that genre, not simply in the excellence of execution (no pun intended) but through extraordinarily sensitive characterisation. James draws a convincing and intoxicating picture of female nurses in a provincial hospital, we can smell the disinfectant, feel the strong wills, sexual repression and envy that abound but also the dedication and devotion. Adam Dalgleish and his horny Sargeant explore this world in a way at once believable and shocking. Very good stuff, much to be recommended.

Adam Dalgliesh was called in to investigate the murders (or were they suicide or mischief?) of two student nurses. We follow Adam Dalgliesh through a tunnel of twists and turns as he set his intelligence and determination to crack the case to work. There are enough suspense in the book to keep the heart pumping. Don¡¦t be in a hurry to flip the pages though, take time to relish at the pleasure of the prose, weaved beautifully into the story.

I enjoyed the setting of the novel. The nurses training school in England was so different from any other place I had read about. The workings of the school and the heirarchy of the staff were fun to read about. The characters were very complicated behind the scenes but appeared very simple at first. Much of the novel is complicated behind the scenes. Not enough actually happens in the present tense for us to read about while it occurs. The most intriguing occurences are told to us afterward. As always, PD James keeps me turning the page, but this time I was left saying, "So what?"

The development of Characters is still evolving and the interwoven story lines leading to the solution of the deaths is interesting. The clue trail goes in directions to confound the reader and make speculation of the story's ultimate ending a surprise.

This novel from the first writing era of James is a masterpiece itself. It starts quite straightforward with two deaths and continues with unceasing suspense. The writer places Dalgliesh very well among the numerous characters of the story, trying to reveal all of their secrets. Interesting substories are being uncoiled as the reader moves forward. The pages whisk fast. You can never be sure about the killer or the motives underneath. Until the very end, the killer is being skillfully hidden by James. One could say that finishing the book lets the reader think about how far human relationships can go.

P.D. James writes good mysteries. Complex enough to be interesting. Good descriptions. However, her characters are all heavy, the plot is dark and there isn't even a smidgen of comic relief. The book needs the silliness and quirkiness of Hercule, the dottering of Miss Marple, the pique of Inspector Japp. After about half it, I put the book down feeling I would need Prozac if I were going to read more.

After reading several modern novels set in previous decades, wherein characters' dialect is anachronistic, I relish the characters in this novel. James would never, ever have a character utter something like "my bad." She is the Jane Austin of living British mystery writers.