Shroud for a nightingale by P. D. James

I liked it. It’s my fourth PDJames book and my favourite so far. I like how she painted so many different personalities, how normal - meaning ‘real’ - they all appear, including her detective Dalgliesh, who has nothing to do with characters like Sherlock or Poirot other than dealing with investigations: he is very human in the fact that he has virtues and defects like everybody, and his only ‘eccentricity’ if we can call it that is the fact that he’s a poet, something rarely associated with the detective work.
As always James likes to describe more than anything else the interior of the houses, she really makes an effort so that you can ‘see’ or at least get an accurate feeling of what it is like. Sometimes it is a bit boring, and yet this is the kind of description, the kind of details that I don’t mind too much because it serves a purpose, to make you understand the kind of person that lives in there.  
The book story in details:
this book is peculiar because it starts and ends with a character that has very little to do with the story: we meet Miss Beale and her friend Miss Burrows as they wake up on the day of the first murder. We learn about their characters and their friendship, and in four pages I got so fond of her that I was relieved to read “as the two friends were to tell each other for years to come...” because that meant that neither of them were to become the book’s victim. We follow Miss Beale as she heads towards the John Carpendar hospital to inspect their nurse training school. Many people there are sick with the flu, which is rather convenient for us or there would be much more characters around :-)
At first, when the first girl is killed, only the local police is called, but when another girl dies Adam Dalgliesh is sent on the case. He interrogates all the people involved with the help of sergeant Masterson, a rather dislikable character for me, and works to put together all the various pieces of the puzzle. 
We meet Mary Taylor the Matron, she’s super-efficient and they all rely on her. Mr Courtney-Briggs who is the surgeon with a God-complex who likes to feel powerful and important. 
Nurse Pearce is the one that has to act the patient in a demonstration lesson; she is given disinfectant instead of milk and she’s the first to die. Nurse Fallon is the second victim, found dead in her bed: some say she committed suicide, but of course she didn’t, she was killed with some nicotine found in the spray used for roses. All the nurses and the Sisters at Nightingale House are interrogated. In a place where people live together day after day there is no real privacy and they all know each other’s habits. 
Pearce liked to have power over people and proclaimed to be very religious, but as it often happens with human beings the more they declare to be something the less they are..
Fallon was once engaged to a gambling-addict actor who committed suicide; he was Mr Courtney-Briggs’ brother. She also had a short sex affair with him. He was a rather private person, and her only ‘friend’ was nurse Goodale. 
Fallon was killed for convenience, to make it look like she was the intended victim or else that she committed suicide maybe out of guilt for having killed Pearce.
Nurse Dakers felt rather guilt after the girls’ deaths because she had once picked up some money lost by Fallon because she wanted to buy a warm coat for her poor mother to wear in the cold winter. 
The Burt twins, also nurses in training, did everything together. 
Nurse Harper was taken home by her father after Pearce’s death, after all they were wealthy enough and she was about to get married anyway, so there was no need for her to continue her training...
Nurse Julia Pardoe was the beautiful and popular and well aware of it. She has a boyfriend and also a story with Sister Hilda Rolfe;  Sister Rolfe was very tired of the place and wanted an apartment of her own but she stayed at Nightingale House because of Julia Pardoe, because she told her not to do it, because she liked it that way. After Julia tells her that she had sex with sergeant Masterson, Rolfe quits her job and went “nursing somewhere in Central Africa”. 
Apparently Dalgliesh never learns anything about Masterson&Pardoe; he certainly kept it a secret, knowing very well that Dalgliesh would not approve.
Sister Brumfett is called ‘the Matron’s pet’ because the two women seem to be very close, and Brumfett is a very loyal admirer of Miss Taylor. She was in charge of the sick ward. 
Miss Gearing was also one of the Sisters: she had a love affair with the married man and was with him the night that Fallon was killed. 
1944, Germany: in a hospital the mentally ill were killed, it was the law, Hitler’s law. September: 31 Polish and Russian human beings were killed. There was a trial, and young nurse Grobel, only eighteen, was acquitted, declared innocent. Now a dying patient recognized Grobel in one of the Sisters: the Matron. Sister Brumfett killed Pearce to protect Taylor’s secret. Fallon too. She also attacked Dalgliesh with a golf club. 
At the end the Matron kills Brumfett, takes her to the garden shed and sets fire. She has a confession letter written by Brumfett, in the hope that they would also believe that Brumfett was Grobel, but Dalgliesh guesses the truth. She asks him to hide the whole Grobel-story, but he can’t , he won’t, there are rules and besides that’s also the motive for the first two killings. When it all comes out at the trial, even if there are no proof of her involvement in Brumfett’s death, she quits her job, causing the end of the training school and Martingale House. 
At the very end we learn that Taylor killed herself because “I haven’t the temperament to live with failure”,  leaving two confession letters, one of which was addressed privately to Dalgliesh, and when Miss Beale goes back to the John Carpendar we learn that nurse Goodale got married, and therefore left the hospital; nurse Dakers stayed, now more confident in herself. Supposedly the Burt twins stayed too, but we only see Dakers and Nightingale House being destroyed.
I love how a simple phrase tells you that this is a British book : “despite her intellectual assent to more modern methods of combating shock, Miss Beale still put her faith in warm strong sweet tea” :lol: love her: warm strong and sweet, just the way I like it (and no milk thank you, no teppuccino for me..)