Shroud for a Nightingale (Adam Dalgliesh Mystery Series #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 is the fourth book in P.D. James’ mystery series featuring Adam Dalgliesh, a Scotland Yard detective and published poet. P.D. James, who died last year at 94, was one of the greatest mystery authors of all time. She offers psychological insight into her characters, who have more depth than those of some of her predecessors. Some readers might find her style, which includes much description of characters and settings, slow-paced, and I admit it took me a long time to learn to appreciate her. But once you do, her books are hard to put down. Although Shroud for a Nightingale is not the first book in the series, it is fine to start with it. It takes place in a nursing school located in Nightingale House, a spooky Victorian mansion, in the late 1960s or early 1970s. Two student nurses are murdered. The first victim, Nurse Pearce, dies while playing the patient during a demonstration of intra-gastric feeding. The second victim, Nurse Fallon, dies in her bed after her nighttime whisky drink is poisoned. At first, people think the first death might have been a practical joke gone wrong and the second death might have been a suicide, or that Pearce was killed in Fallon’s place, since Fallon was supposed to have played the patient that day. But Dalgliesh is convinced both deaths were murders, and he is determined to find who was responsible. His investigation uncovers many secrets in the lives of the students and the senior nurses, who are called “Sisters”. It turns out that practically everyone in Nightingale House had a motive, and the mystery kept me guessing until the end.

Although it was written in 1971, Shroud for a Nightingale does not seem especially dated to me, except for the lack of computers and cell phones, and the attitude that a woman was expected to give up her career when she got married. Some reviewers have said the medical procedures described in the book are out of date, which is probably true. But P.D. James had great insight into human nature, and that has not changed.

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!

When in doubt, I always choose a P.D. James book to read or to hear on Audible. I should have skipped this one. It seems cobbled together and holds no suspense for my taste. There are numerous characters who are easily mixed up and I didn't care about any of them. The plot was weak and the setting loosely used as an afterthought. Dalgliesh seemed lukewarm and shallow as the main man, and he didn't even show up for the longest time. The ending was contrived and clumsily so. I think P.D. was not in top form for this novel. The best thing about it is the title.

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.

It's funny, I read this one, and then put it in my charity pile.....and now I wish I hadn't. Unlike the seemingly endless Allingham mysteries I read and promptly forget, this one stuck with me. SUCH atmosphere, such a twisted, turning story, full of surprises. Its the best kind of mystery for those who love mysteries. I definitely am a PD James fan now.

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

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.

Shroud for a Nightingale is a fair book. If you take into account that it was written early in James' career, you might judge it less harshly as it seems she has learned from her mistakes.

What mistakes? James relies too much in giving her suspects prescience in anticipating Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh's next question. All too frequently his interrogations are punctuated with lines like "as if reading Dalgliesh's mind, Nurse Dakers said..." or "Sister Rolfe said ... as if Dalgliesh had spoken his thoughts aloud." Once or twice would be one thing, or at least allowing Dalgliesh to keep mum to prompt the suspect to fill the awkward silence with an unintended comment, but the frequency of the "psychic" segue makes it feel like sloppy writing. Another thing James does several times is have Dalgliesh run an unspecified deduction by his sergeant to which the sergeant graciously allows that "it might've happened that way." Again, it's sloppy and perhaps even out and out cheating.

Despite these rather appalling weaknesses, James' writing at times is as strong as in her more recent masterpieces. Sergeant Masterson's interrogation a la sadistic tango is wonderful, as is Dalgliesh's attempt to interrogate the housekeeper, Martha Collins. Her pacing is spot on in both cases and in the latter case, her ear for dialect - and ability to transcribe it intelligibly - is amazing. The spooky setting and overall mood of Nightingale house, while perhaps clichéd at times (the wandering ghost, the eerie happenings in the conservatory), is nevertheless effective. James provides perhaps too many suspects, but their varied motives and concomitant red herrings give the book a rich and robust texture.

As much as I appreciated having Dalgliesh avoid the potentially trite and clichéd path at the end of the book, I'm really not satisfied with the way James wrapped up the mystery. Without spoiling the ending, let me say that while it certainly "could" have happened that way, I would have liked to see Dalgliesh find some way to resolve things differently.

Despite some significant flaws, Shroud for a Nightingale, remains a well plotted and decently constructed mystery. As a piece of fiction that presents its hero as a work in progress, the book is highly enjoyable, though not entirely satisfying.

Written and set in the late 60's, "Shroud" does suffer from the faults I found in the first two mysteries involving Inspector Dalgliesh: slow-pacing at times, more details about non-essentials than needed, too much description of buildings and forests. I like my mysteries more in the Robert B. Parker style, 90 percent dialogue. That said, this one, if it has never been made into a British film or a TV mini-series, should have been. Three successful murders and another attempted one pop up in its 300 pages. Hints of a couple of lesbian relationships, and one or two extra-marital hetero affairs, and a pretty student nurse who apparently goes both ways casually, are surprising in this tale of a nursing school plagued by fatal acts and dark secrets. Not every revelation is totally credible, and the twist at the end was a surprise to me, and made me a bit sad for the chief villain. I understand from reading other reviews from Ms. James long career that her more recent thrillers are more enjoyable than her early ones. Perhaps I will dip into some of those in the future, but after reading her first three one after another, I'll take a vacation from her style for awhile.

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.

This is my second P.D. James book. Loved it and could barely put it down. Interesting setting and good plot. Just enough detail about the medical profession in England. Watched for clues along the way, but was surprised by ending. I had picked someone else for the murderer altho I decided early on that the two murders were done by same person. This book has me hooked on Ms. James. Am planning to read the rest of her books as soon as I can.

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.

Once again PD James proves why she's one of the reigning queens of the classic mystery novel. They're fiercely intelligent, witty, and intricately plotted,not like so many of today's recent entries which mostly involve serial killers with a vendetta. Here, Dangliesh is called to a hospital where two nurses have been murdered,or was it suicide?

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.

I did like this one, even though it bounced between points of view more than I usually like. The funny thing with this mystery was that I guessed who the murderer was before the book was halfway done. I don't usually guess that (and I don't usually try, liking to just follow the book's revelations), but I knew very quickly who it was. I'm not sure if it means James let it slip early, or if I was just quick to pick up on things. Or if it was a lucky guess.

That said, it was an interesting plotline, and a good book. I do think I like her writing more as the series progresses - I can't tell if that means her writing is getting better (I'm going from her earliest books on), or if I'm just getting more used to her style.

Am liking it, though, and definitely continuing the series.

Having now read half a dozen of James's novels featuring Adam Dalgliesh, senior homicide specialist from Scotland Yard (including some of the earlier works and some of the more recent) I'm beginning to get a handle on her style. She started out writing "cozies" -- her first effort, _Cover Her Face,_ could almost have been a more literary Agatha Christie -- but she soon decided there was no reason to omit the unpleasantness of the real world that Christie went to such lengths to avoid. She follows the "limited pool of suspects" method that most detective writers adopt almost by necessity. In real life, of course, things are seldom that neat; the killer may turn out to be someone completely unconnected with the early investigation. But if that were to happen in a novel, the reader would be justified in complaining. However, some authors (Michael Connelly comes to mind) introduce the suspects gradually over the first half of the book. James prefers to bring them all in at once: "Here are all the players and you're on notice that one of them dunnit. But which one?" This book is her fourth and it's already far more sophisticated in style and language than her first. It's set in a nurses' training school in a market town not too far from London and the focus is on the half-dozen third-year students preparing to graduate, on the Matron (director) of the school, and on the handful of professionals associated with the school (teaching sisters, a particularly egotistical surgeon, the pharmacist, a couple of techs and cleaners). The first murder is pretty gruesome: Someone has substituted a corrosive cleaning agent for the milk in the intragastric feeding tube during a student demonstration (they all take turns as guinea pigs for the benefit of the class). It obviously wasn't an accident, but was the victim herself the target? Because it seems she took the place of another girl who was taken ill during the previous night. But when a second student nurse turns up dead -- in her bed this time -- Dalgliesh is brought in to find and arrest the culprit in a hurry before the school itself is tainted. Even though all the suspects (including the killer) are present almost from the first page, James leaves the motive itself until the last couple of chapters, which isn't exactly playing fair with the reader; for reasons that are immediately apparent, this discovery automatically eliminates half the suspect pool, and would have done much earlier if she could have found a way to introduce the relevant facts. Still, the characters are very fully developed and the writing itself will weave itself around you, which makes the book well worth reading. One warning though: I have seen occasional complaints from lazier (or less observant) readers that the British police and court system is "too hard to understand." I've never had any problem with that, personally. But the world of British medicine, both of doctors and nurses, is far more foreign than that, especially under the National Health System, and James assumes her audience knows all about it. (Well, her British readers will, of course.) Since no explanations of terms like "set" and even "Sister" are provided, the American reader may have to simply *bleep* over some of the jargon.

I feel so bad for PD James and so horrible for disagreeing with other readers but this novel was sub-par at best. It was incredibly predictable and very poorly written given PD James' talent. I gave it 1 star because I know she is capable of so much better! But as they say, every author has one bad book in them... this means I can enjoy all her others...

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.