Forgotten Book: SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE, P.D. James

My little green book

My plan this year for my contributions to Friday's Forgotten Books hosted by Pattinase is to feature books I read 20 years ago - in 1993- from the records I have in my "little green book", which I started in 1975. In 1993 I read 111 books and was pretty well addicted to crime fiction by then.

My choice this week is SHROUD FOR A NIGHTINGALE by P. D. James, published in 1971.

This is #4 in James's Adam Dalgliesh series.

Synopsis (Amazon)

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.

Inspector Adam Dalgliesh series (Fantastic Fiction)
1. Cover Her Face (1962)
2. A Mind to Murder (1963)
3. Unnatural Causes (1967)
4. Shroud for a Nightingale (1971)
5. The Black Tower (1975)
6. Death of an Expert Witness (1977)
7. A Taste for Death (1986)
8. Devices and Desires (1989)
9. Original Sin (1994)
10. A Certain Justice (1997)
11. Death in Holy Orders (2001)
12. The Murder Room (2003)
13. The Lighthouse (2005)
14. The Private Patient (2008)

P.D. James, Baroness James of Holland Park, OBE, FRSA, FRSL, is now 92, just a little younger than my mother, and has not added to the Dalgliesh series for about 5 years and we must assume that there will be no more. The Dalgliesh series was published over a period of 46 years, with the first COVER HER FACE  appearing just over 50 years ago.

Her two most recent publications were Death Comes to Pemberley (2011) and Talking about Detective Fiction (2009), both remarkable achievements when you consider her age.