An almost-graduated nursing student is killed while playing the patient in a demonstration/instruction lecture before a visiting VIP. It might have been suicide - the girl was extremely religious, temperamental, moody, and prone to extremes of behavior - much of it rather unforgiving, and some of it perhaps illegal. As the local police work their way through the suspect list and information they've gathered, no real conclusion is reached and the case goes cold. But before too long another student is dead under suspicious circumstances, and the "coincidence" is too much for one high-powered doctor connected with the training facility to endure. He calls Scotland Yard himself, and Adam Dalgleish is assigned to the case, along with Sargent Masterson, a young, not exactly raw (but not far removed from it either) policeman with a slight tendency for bullying witnesses. He's got a lot to learn. Madeleine Goodale said: "I should think that everyone knew. Everyone at Nightingale House anyway. There was enough talk about it at breakfast."

Sister Gearing cast an apprehensive and interrogative glance at the Matron, received a confirmatory nod and resumed her lesson.James is a peerless creator of atmosphere. She herself has always claimed that the first thing that comes to her when embarking upon a new novel is the setting. Undoubtedly, Nightingale House, the setting for most of the events in this book, singularly inappropriate for a nursing college, is almost as vividly described as any of the characters. It is a dark, nasty house, an evil house, where crimes of abuse, neglect and death had previously taken place. The final scene, when the house is finally demolished, is a masterpiece of descriptive writing which conveys so much more than just a sense of place. I exaggerate a bit, but their condescension and awareness-of-status/position/class is glaringly clear in so many books I read by English writers, even those set in the present day. Miss Burrows frequently terrified her own students, not to mention most of her colleagues on the teaching staff, but would have been amazed to be told it. Miss Beale asked: Since adaptations of mystery novels often suffer from short running times and insufficient consideration of clues, you would think a 5-hr. miniseries format would be ideal for letting the viewer try to solve the mystery herself. Thus it's disappointing when, after investing so much time, SfaN gives up on the "fair play" solve-it-yourself aspect, choosing simply to reveal the answer in a way that no viewer could discover. (And it's not the only Dalgliesh miniseries to do this.) Strangely, SfaN goes on and on for 5 hours but never seems to think about clues any more than a 90 minute movie. Shroud for a Nightingale was adapted for television in 1984 as part of the long running Dalgliesh TV-series for Anglia Television/ITV (1983-1998) starring actor Roy Marsden as Commander*** Adam Dalgliesh of Scotland Yard. You can watch the 5 episodes of the 1984 adaptation starting with Episode 1 on YouTube here. The adaptation is reasonably faithful to the novel and includes the original "Unsatisfactory Ending".

James is one of my favorite writers, and I've reread most of her books several times; this time I listened to SHROUD in audio, read by Michael Jayston, courtesy of my library. He's a smooth, excellent reader, and this was very enjoyable. And now to the plot... But there was nothing to criticize in her welcome. As she reached the top step, the heavy door swung open letting out a gust of warm air and a smell of fresh coffee. A uniformed maid stood deferentially aside and behind her down the wide oak staircase, gleaming against the dark panelling like a Renaissance portrait in grey and gold, came the figure of Matron Mary Taylor, hand out-stretched. Miss Beale assumed her bright professional smile, compounded of happy expectation and general reassurance, and stepped forward to meet her. The ill-fated inspection of the John Carpendar Training School had begun. Actor Bertie Carvel as Adam Dalgliesh in the Acorn TV series "Dalgliesh" (2021-). Image sourced from IMDb. Nurse Harper reiterated stoutly: "It's daft to talk about murder. No one would want to kill Pearce."Nurse Goodale asked sharply: "What was she wearing?" Maureen was unsurprised at this apparently irrelevant question. My dear woman, this girl's dead! Dead! What does it matter where we leave the body? She can't feel. She can't know. For God's sake don't start being sentimental about death. The indignity is that we die at all, not what happens to our bodies." Written in a completely classic style this may seem a bit slow-moving for modern tastes, but is downright explosive when compared with earlier, similar, stories. I've recently been reading Mignon Eberhart's nursing mysteries from the 1930s, and if you want "slow-moving thriller" (not *exactly* an oxymoron...), then her earliest work is for you! But while Eberhart was entertaining, James is an overall much better writer, and it is fascinating to see here how little of the attitudes towards nurses and their craft had changed in the intervening forty years. And while outside of the small-hospital environment (the nurses live-in, and don't spend much time in The Real World) things are changing rapidly in the social sense, here the ethos is of an older Britain even in 1970 - the values are traditional, the plotting traditional, the writing style traditional. But not stuffy, not at all boring.