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.

Amongst the blackmail, lies and hastily kept secrets of the Nightingale nursing school, another student dies equally mysteriously and it is up to Adam Dalgliesh to unmask a killer who has decided to prescribe murder as the cure for all ills.

In Shroud for a Nightingale, award-winning P.D. James (author of Death Comes to Pemberley, Original Sin and Children of Men) plots a complex story of secrets, blackmail and suspicion. The novel was adapted for television in 1984, with Roy Marsden as Adam Dalgliesh and Joss Ackland as the surgeon, Stephen Courtney-Briggs.