Shroud for a Nightingale

Rating:
Summary: Sink into the subtly sinister and claustrophic setting!
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Topping
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: One of James' best
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Such a Pleasure to Read
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: interesting setting, strange plot
Review: 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?"

Rating:
Summary: Oh no!
Review: 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...

Rating:
Summary: Chilling Read
Review: I was not able to put "Shroud for a Nightingale" down. I have ready many of PD James' books. This one tops my list. Her character portraits are superb and so is the action. The cast of characters are diverse. The setting sinister. I'd call this a must read!

Rating:
Summary: The Best of James, The Worst of James
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Keeps you guessing
Review: Shroud for a Nightingale is a well-written, well-plotted mystery that will keep you guessing. A young student nurse dies during a training exercise, another is found dead in her bed. The first could have been the result of a practical joke gone bad, the second, a suicide. Or they both could be murder. P.D. James will keep you guessing until the end as to the truth about these deaths and the truth about the nurses, the doctors, the instructors at this very deadly hospital.

Rating:
Summary: Good, but not her best
Review: 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.