A classic whodunit, Shroud for a Nightingale traces an investigation by Chief Superintendent Adam Dalgliesh into the sudden deaths of two students in the virtually all-female world of Nightingale House, the nurses’ training school at the John Carpendar Hospital. The book opens in bleak winter with the spectacularly public, grisly poisoning—during a training inspector’s visit—of Heather Pearce, the student taking the role of the patient in a demonstration of stomach-tube feeding. In the second chapter, Jo Fallon, the nurse whom Pearce replaced at the last moment, dies quietly in bed after drinking a poisoned whiskey nightcap. The remaining six chapters of the story detail Dalgliesh’s careful probing of this closed community’s secrets with the help of his subordinate, Masterson, with whom he has a civil but not cordial working relationship.

Introduced into the narrative in pensive reflection over the second corpse, Dalgliesh moves swiftly to a formal interrogation of Nightingale House’s inhabitants. It is primarily through his eyes that the investigation unfolds, although the story also offers selective access to the consciousness of several other characters, including Masterson, the matron (Mary Taylor), and Rolfe. As Dalgliesh and Masterson interview the variously garrulous, wary, or indifferent suspects, they discover plentiful motives among revelations of adultery, abortion, homosexuality, and blackmail. Against this backdrop, Dalgliesh becomes convinced that they are dealing with a double murder, especially after gathering further clues at lunch with the three senior nurses, Rolfe, Brumfett, and Gearing. Yet his long day’s work is over only after he conducts further interviews, endures a private tea with Gearing, discovers the nicotine poison hidden in a fire bucket, and fixes the time of the first murder in a midnight chat with the school’s maid. The crux of the case, his intuition tells him, is the missing library book that Pearce borrowed on Fallon’s card—likewise missing.

The next-to-last chapter briefly shifts setting for both detectives’ interviews with witnesses in London the following day, then brings Dalgliesh back to the grounds of Nightingale House at night for a severe blow to his head. Now equipped with the library book, however, and Masterson’s information about a dying patient who recognized an ex-Nazi nurse, Dalgliesh confirms his hunch that a woman committed both murders to protect the true identity of Irmgard Grobel, a war criminal. Before daylight the next morning, the discovery of Brumfett’s body precipitates Dalgliesh’s confrontation with the matron, who unsuccessfully tries to convince him that Brumfett, the self-confessed killer of Pearce and Fallon, also killed herself because she was Grobel. Lacking the proof to arrest her, Dalgliesh does not see justice done until months later: On the warm August day of the epilogue, he reads and then destroys the confession that the matron left for him before her suicide.

James’s fourth novel featuring Adam Dalgliesh, Shroud for a Nightingale won an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, a Silver Dagger from the British Crime Writers Association, and the label of “masterpiece” from a 1974 Times Literary Supplement review. It marked the author’s entry both into the world market and into the exclusive company of England’s foremost mystery writers, all of them women: Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Josephine Tey, Margery Allingham, and Ngaio Marsh. In fact, with the publication of Shroud for a Nightingale , the critical consensus was that James had surpassed these predecessors by creating not one-dimensional artificial puzzles but painstakingly crafted novels—complete with complex psychological characterizations, authentic descriptions, and contemporary social issues—that can hold their own outside the mystery genre. Foremost among the skillfully evoked figures in...