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    Shroud for a Nightingale
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    Shroud for a Nightingale
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    Shroud for a Nightingale
    Audiobook12 hours

    Shroud for a Nightingale

    Written by P. D. James

    Narrated by Penelope Dellaporta

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    P.D. James is "the greatest living mystery writer."-People

    The young women of Nightingale House are there to learn to nurse and comfort the suffering. But when one of the students plays patient in a demonstration of nursing skills, she is horribly, brutally killed. Another student dies equally mysteriously, and it is up to Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard to unmask a killer who has decided to prescribe murder as the cure for all ills.

    The New York Times called Shroud for a Nightingale "mystery at its best."


    From the Compact Disc edition.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateJan 6, 2009
    ISBN9781415961391
    Author

    P. D. James

    P. D. James (1920–2014) was born in Oxford in 1920. She worked in the National Health Service and the Home Office From 1949 to 1968, in both the Police Department and Criminal Policy Department. All that experience was used in her novels. She won awards for crime writing in Britain, America, Italy, and Scandinavia, including the Mystery Writers of America Grandmaster Award and the National Arts Club Medal of Honour for Literature. She received honorary degrees from seven British universities, was awarded an OBE in 1983 and was created a life peer in 1991.

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    Reviews for Shroud for a Nightingale

    4/5

    484 ratings23 reviews

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    • 4/5
      This is in many ways so standard a police procedural that my attention wandered: let's see ... interview suspects one by one, isolated (somewhat) location ... James's writing elevates it, however, though it can't escape the (for me) built-in tedium of the form. Characterization and dialogue are outstanding, as is the evocation of place. James has a sometimes astonishing eye for the telling detail. Very enjoyable. I read it over a weekend.
    • 4/5
      Excellent!
    • 5/5
      Shroud for a Nightingale is set in a nursing school attached to a hospital outside of London somewhere. The school itself is housed in an old Victorian mansion on the grounds of the hospital which is acknowledged from the beginning to be a very poor building for the school. But for us as readers, it adds wonderful atmosphere. And when it comes to books, I'm all about the atmosphere.During a teaching demonstration of how to insert a feeding tube, a student nurse is somehow fed poison instead of the milk she is supposed to be given and dies on the table. She is not a student that anyone will miss. When another student dies two weeks later, Inspector Dalgleish of Scotland Yard is called in. The course of this investigation uncovers many, many secrets that the inhabitants of Nightingale House did not want coming to light but which of them was someone willing to kill for? This story has suspects, red herrings and motives galore. How Dalgleish sorts them out to find the killer is a top-notch detective story. One of the themes of the book is how much people like power and what they will do to get and hold on to it. It's a fascinating study in how even small amounts of power over others can go to a person's head. Compared to Agatha Christie, a P.D. James novel is a much denser, heavier read. Her books remind me of the turkey at a Thanksgiving dinner while Christie would be the pumpkin pie with whipped cream. I can pick up Christie and enjoy her books anytime at all. I have to decide to read a P.D. James. But her books, and this one in particular, are worth the time and effort.
    • 2/5
      I read “Shroud of a Nightingale” as part of my BA degree, otherwise I would’ve given up reading after a couple of chapters.I found this too mundane and slow-paced. The occasional scene did draw me in, though “occasional” isn’t good enough.
    • 4/5
      It is surprising that James remains so popular when her writing has so much dated snobbery and patronizing content. The student nurses are even referred to as "children" on more than one occasion, as if they were unruly 5-year-olds. And her characters are able to determine an individual's intelligence with just one look! James' writing style, so well-formed and genteel, obviously ameliorates the weakness. Certainly, if the reader can get past the defects and unlikeable characters, a clever mystery is the reward.
    • 3/5
      Seemed to drag on and on.
    • 2/5
      An Adam Dalgliesh mystery surrounding a double murder in a nursing home-cum-training center. A typical whodunit. I find Dalgliesh better than Cordelia Gray mystery where book usually crawls.

      This book too began at morbidly slow place, it didn't help that setting was a nursing home full of seemingly dull, spinster characters. But it got better, when narrative unfolds from POV of Dalgliesh, who is an experienced professional detective. However, other than mystery do not expect any thrill or excitement from the book.
    • 4/5
      The best P.D. James I've read so far (I was on quite a mystery kick for a few weeks there). More than its predecessors, this book delivered on creepy atmosphere and had a very intellectually satisfying mystery (although one key element could have been foreshadowed better).
    • 3/5
      Nice, simple detective novel; funny at times, suspenseful, and keeps you guessing for quite some time. Pretty typical PD James/Adam Dalgliesh story.
    • 3/5
      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.
    • 3/5
      This is one of the earlier Dalgleish mysteries, typically set in a closed institution beset by hidden rivalries and secrets....The focus is definitely on the institution and its staff rather than Dalgleish and his team...it's fairly low key and traditional in tone...some good red herrings.
    • 4/5
      I decided to read all of the Adam Daigliesh mysteries in one fell swoop and am glad I did. First, they are classic British mysteries all well-deserving of the respect P.D. James has earned for them and all are a good read. However, what is interesting is to watch the author develop her style from the early ones to the later ones. And, in fact, A Shroud for a Nightingale and The Black Tower (the fourth and fifth in the series) is where she crosses the divide. The later books have much more character development -- both for the players and the detectives -- make Dalgleish more rounded and are generally much more than a good mystery yarn -- they're fine novels that happen to be mysteries. The first three books (Cover Her Face, A Mind to Murder, Unnatural Causes) are just that much more simplistic. But read any or all -- she's a great writer and they are definitely worth the time.
    • 4/5
      Spoilers in penultimate paragraph.In preparation for writing this review, I skimmed some of my previous reviews and 1-5 star ratings of the other P.D. James books I’ve read. To my surprise, I’ve rated most of them as 3-stars; a little above average. Some I didn’t rate, however, judging by the reviews I think they rate higher than that, but still no 5-stars. So why do I keep coming back to Dame James? I think it’s the mix of usual and unusual that does it. She has a very distinct formula to weaving her tales and that starts with the people involved with the crime. Usually she starts out with some environmental back story that features the victims (there is usually more than one) and the suspects. Much like a Christie mystery, we’re left to judge these people for ourselves. And boy, is there a lot to judge. Usually there are a bunch of jerks and a few bright spots of sanity. What an eye for the repugnant personality trait James has. Some of her characters have so many of them it’s a wonder they weren’t murdered themselves long ago. The nurses, instructors and other staff members in this book have no compunction about showing their nasty sides. No pulling punches, no being conciliatory to preserve peace, no concessions or allowances; just all vitriol all the time.And I have to include Dalgliesh as one of the jerks. He seriously is. He instantly dislikes most of the people he comes into contact with, writing scurrilous monologues about them in his head. Then he will reach the point where he can’t hold it in any longer and will deliberately lash out at someone in a subtly cruel or manipulative way. Oh with what glee does he push people’s buttons. Sometimes we’re glad to see him get away with it, but sometimes it’s just antagonistic and mean. If this is not enough to underscore his innate anti-social personality, we also have to have snotty little asides about other people’s tastes and how superior his is to theirs. I do like that she often gives us views of Dalgliesh through the eyes of others. His underlings are particularly good at skewering him in their private thoughts. No one dares to do it to his face though. In some ways he’s insufferable, but that’s only based on early books. In later ones she softens him by describing his inner struggles with poetry, with ethics and with the deaths of his wife and son. He also struggles with duty and how far he has to go in the name of it. It’s an old-fashioned idea and one that underscores the rigid bonds of his personality. Underneath it though, he’s thoughtful and not without mercy. Those come later though, and a reader starting at the beginning of the series will have to look past his abrasive persona to the good points of him and the way she crafts her novels. Mostly that hinges on the plots. The crimes are usually pretty personally motivated, meaning there is some really neurotic reason for the killing. James’s novels aren’t peppered by psychopaths randomly killing based on some delusion, and that makes them all the more devious. This book is a great example because everyone in it is supposed to be a caring and gentle healthcare provider. They live in a claustrophobia inducing world that would make most of us really squirm; the lack of privacy and autonomy, the constant being at the beck-and-call of everyone else, the confinement and routine; all designed to have us sympathize, and we do. When eventually the killer is revealed (which I almost never get right and is only done after Dalgliesh does a lot of interviews and inner sleuthing) we feel sorry for her, just a little.In this one, I had some swirling thoughts about Matron and her cool, detached sensibility and so I wasn’t surprised that she was guilty of something. Just not of everything. Her lap-dog relationship with Brumfett was just weird. They seemed so opposite that it had to be some form of obligation that bound them. That was the hinge. A lot of other suspects to consider. I couldn’t decide which of the sisters though, they were all pretty much equally repugnant, especially Rolfe and Brumfett. Witches the pair of them. And that surgeon, Courtney-Briggs. Ugh. He was pretty repellent. Oh and what’s with everyone having snotty and disparaging things to say about the police? Can’t anyone be helpful and understand how important the job is to the whole justice system? Can’t anyone be reasonable? And if you can’t how about keeping to yourself, huh? What a bunch of assholes, really.James’s writing is sort of old-fashioned, but it’s pretty soothing overall. She uses description sparingly when it comes to locale, but is so specific with her characterizations that nothing is left to your imagination. I think she wants you to be working on filling in the blanks of the mystery, not the suspects. Another thing I like about James’s writing is that she makes me use my dictionary. Not many writers do and I like it. Little-known gems like pavane (n. a stately dance done in elegant clothing) and antiphonal (adj. sung or recited alternately by two groups). MS Word sees pavane as misspelling of pagan or paving. Anyone who can do that is worth reading.
    • 4/5
      Nice, solid English murder story in the best traditions of the genre. I haven't always been convinced by P.D. James, but this one seems to work very well. There's a lot of insight into the peculiarities of the nursing profession that clearly comes from her own long experience of working in the health service. The book is set in the late 1960s, when nursing was still an (almost) exclusively female world, and one of the very few areas where women routinely held senior management jobs - always provided that they were prepared to remain single all their working lives. James looks at the peculiarities of life in a nurse training school attached to a large, provincial hospital, where two student nurses have died in suspicious circumstances in between the cocoa, disinfectant and starched caps. The detective, Dalgliesh, is a rather oddly passive character, who does little beside listening and dealing with the occasional ethical dilemma. More sponge than Maigret. There's no real interplay with his colleagues. Only one other policeman has a significant part, and that only in one chapter, which is more a distraction than anything else, designed to move the scene out of the hospital and build the tension up a bit as we get close to the dénouement. All the real work is done by the nurses themselves, as they slowly build up a picture of the social dynamics of the training school for us. You get the feeling that James isn't very interested in writing about men: why have a male detective at all in that case, I wonder?
    • 4/5
      At the Nightingale House Training School for nurses, a nurse has died during a routine clinical practice session. Adam Dalgleish is called in to investigate. Blackmail is the underlying motive. This book seems a little dated now (it is 40 years old) but is still a good read.
    • 5/5
      Re-reading this book made me feel old: the plot contains a middle aged lady who had been a young German accused of war crimes. When I, initially, consumed this tome, such was a reasonable current event; now, it ages the book. The cerebral nature of the adventure is also something one tends not to get nowadays, but something which I thoroughly enjoyed. I do not need my detective fiction to tell me what it is really like on "the mean streets". I like a poetry writing, thinking detective: top rate!
    • 4/5
      This is the first P.D. James book I've read, though I saw the movie of Children of Men. It took me a bit to get into (it seems like every british police story I pick up is very dense), but once it started rolling I got caught up in it. This seemed different than other police mysteries I read, because you really only see Dalgliesh in the context of the investigation -- You don't know much about him or his history or home life. The motive for the murders was something I would have never guessed (along with the final twist). I'd definitely be willing to read others in this series.
    • 5/5
      It's here in Shroud for a Nightingale that I believe P D James reaches the fullness of her gifts as a writer of police procedurals. This fourth installment in the Adam Dalgliesh series is better-developed and richer than the first three, and shows more evidence of the embellishments and risks James takes with the basic form, yielding great rewards.The setting here is a nurse training school shoehorned into a wicked old Victorian pile in the home counties. The initial killing is spectacular and gruesome, and the rest of the book sustains this intensity.Nightingale is also notable for James's uncanny ability to make you want to know more about her characters, both the good guys and the suspects. She keeps you teetering on the fine line between good healthy curiosity and frank prurience, as the dirty little details of private lives are exposed and examined. No one, no one does this better.Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      PD James is a master of mystery. Adam Dahlgliesh is one of my favorite characters. Only Ms James could create a poetry writing policeman. Set in a teaching hospital, Adam arrives to investigate a patient and ends up investigating the death of two student nurses.
    • 4/5
      P D James not only writes better plots than Agatha Christie, she also creates excellent characters. But is she a Cozy crime writer? Not in this story at least.
    • 4/5
      It kept me guessing, and the sense of the sour, strange school where the story is set is vivid. I did have to go back to review who was who, though, but it was a minor detour.
    • 5/5
      This was a really excellent mystery! I saw the BBC adaptation on PBS a while back, so I had a vague recollection as to who the perpetrator was, but that didn't lessen my enjoyment of this at all.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyable but short Daigleish book. Short but just right. Daigleish investigates murder in a nursing teaching home.