Using inversion of adjunction, we deduce from Nadels theorem a vanishing property for ideals sheaves on projective varieties, a special case of which recovers a result due to Bertram--Ein--Lazarsfeld. This enables us to generalize to a large class of projective schemes certain bounds on Castelnuovo--Mumford regularity previously obtained by Bertram--Ein--Lazarsfeld in the smooth case and by Chardin--Ulrich for locally complete intersection varieties with rational singularities. Our results are tested on several examples.