At several points the main character is discussing the case with his assistant and, despite the fact they've already talked about the evidence and what they think and he's the current viewpoint character and we follow both of them through everything important they do, their important deductions are covered up with sudden reported speech, like "he said what had happened, his assistant said yes that's obvious". Like are you *kidding* me how lazy can you getThe book is OK enough but the denouement is pretty silly and is the sort of thing that makes 95% of the book feel like a total waste. There aren't enough clues for it to make sense and the ones given which do lead to the ending don't really feel consistent or reasonable. They try and link the ending to a character's personality and then right at the end do a "oh btw actually it's someone totally different" for who there are 0 clues given. Not horrible horrible but pretty typical mystery fare in that the ending may as well be detached from the rest of the book because the rest of the book isn't important.EDIT: After thinking about it some more, decreased my rating to 1 star because of the above and1) The ending is absolute nonsense. The motives given make no sense, the story of the identity of a character makes no sense and the entire book requires several characters to have acted with no intelligence or thought at all, even ignoring the typical mystery trope of "oh they avoided an easier way because of X unlikely idiosyncrasy"2) The main character is dull as ditchwater. I remember hardly any of what he did. His assistant just had sex with a suspect (no lead up, no follow up) and made misogynistic+abusive comments about a witness. I'm not saying all characters have to be cool and likeable but scenes which are 15 pages of abusive, cruel thoughts about an old woman from someone who's seriously abused his position is horrible.3) I could predict an event that happened near the end because it happened at near the exact same time and in a similar way to the other one of her books I read and, like that one, puts the character in incredibly serious danger and then pulls it out by having the dangerous person be a complete idiot and events to play out perfectly. (view spoiler)[A strong person hits you hard in the head with a golf club and within a few hours you're pretty much fine? Ridiculous. Also pretty sure they could have struck twice. (hide spoiler)]
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, known as P. D. James, is an English crime writer and a life peer in the House of Lords. She was born in August 1920.This is a book my mother gave me many years ago. I probably read it then, but had forgotten the story, so when I cam across it, I read it again.Nightingale House is where a group of third year student nurses live while they learn the art of nursing. There is a routine inspection of the nursing school by the General Nursing Council. It ends horribly with the death of a student during a demonstration of intra-gastric feeding tubes. One of the students, Heather Pearce, who is playing the part of the patient during a demonstration, is internally fed bathroom disinfectant instead of milk and dies thrashing on the floor in front of the class. Jo Fallon was meant to be the patient. However, she was taken ill at the last minute and Heather Pearce was the substitute.The question is raised as to whether this is an accident or murder. Then, this gruesome beginning is compounded with a second student death. Another student nurse is found dead in her bed. This time Jo Fallon is the victim; poison is the method. It is now clear this is murder and Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh is called in to solve the murders. His implacable determination to get at the truth is welcomed by the nursing staff with varying degrees of coolness. Dalgliesh is not quite as developed as a character as he is in later books, but the basics are there.nightingale bookI love P.D. James’s attention to detail: the descriptions bring the locations so vividly to mind. There are a lot of red herrings in this story and I changed my mind a couple of times before I got to the end of the book. I still did not guess the end of the story. She never fails to produce clever, unexpected solutions, and a dramatically satisfying ending, and this novel is no different. I enjoyed it and highly recommend it.
A nursing school inspection ends horribly with the death of a student during a demonstration of intra-gastric feeding tubes. This gruesome beginning is compounded with a second student death, and the local police are exchanged for the Yard’s Inspector Adam Dalgliesh whose implacable determination to get at the truth is welcomed by the nursing staff with varying degrees of coolness.I’m not sure where in the series this one falls, but this Dalgliesh novel was just a bit too staid and dated to hold my attention properly. It didn’t lack James’ firm hold of character or her exquisite attention to detail (although there were points when I almost wished it did lack the latter), but the characters and detail were rarely interesting to me, and while curiosity got me to the dénouement, once there I was both unconvinced and, unfortunately, had seen similar motives in other [crime] novels (to be fair, it’s likely they were written after this one) and failed to find it as clever as it probably was. I still enjoyed Dalgliesh, and the moments of progress of the investigation, but for all the swiftness of his deductions it still felt like an extraordinarily long read.
—trishtrash
I believe it was Red Skelton who said that to be a writer you have to be a close observer of human nature, but not so close that you start to hate everyone. P.D. James seems to frequently drift across the line into hating everybody. The men in James' world tend to be pompous, self-absorbed, preening narcissists, but they are almost nice compared to the women. The women are often petty, manipulative, mean-spirited and deliberately cruel. Shroud for a Nightingale is about a series of murders at a small nursing school in rural England. It is about a group of women who work and live together in a rather small space and a veneer of niceness covers a lot of animosity. It is a solid mystery with a number of twists and misleads. Readers familiar with the conventions of the mystery genre may guess the solution, but I think James here is more interested in exploring the dark corners of her characters than with presenting a puzzle.
—Keith Davis
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.
—Vicki Kondelik
