Two nurses investigate a millionaire’ s suspicious gunshot wound in this “absorbing” mystery by a Special Edgar Award–winning author (The New York Times). It takes a compound fracture to bring Craig Brent and Drue Cable together. A millionaire injured in an auto accident, Craig falls quickly for his nurse, wedding Drue as soon as his arm is mended. Craig’s father, disgusted to see his son marrying below his station, pressures him into a divorce, and the whirlwind marriage dies in Reno. A year later, the young lovers are given a second chance, when a bullet shatters Craig’s shoulder. The family insists Craig shot himself while cleaning his gun, but Drue has never known a man to clean his gun at eleven o’clock at night. She calls on Sarah Keate, whose nursing skill is matched only by her deductive reasoning, to unravel the mystery. When Sarah arrives at the Brent house, Craig is in a drugged sleep. If he is ever to awake, the nurses must unmask the killer in his family.
Mignon G. Eberhart (1899–1996) wrote dozens of mystery novels over nearly sixty years. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, she began writing in high school, swapping English essays with her fellow students in exchange for math homework. She attended Nebraska Wesleyan University, and in the 1920s began writing fiction in her spare time, publishing her first novel, The Patient in Room 18, in 1929. With the follow-up, While the Patient Slept (1931), she won a $5,000 Scotland Yard Prize, and by the end of the 1930s she was one of the most popular female mystery writers on the planet. Before Agatha Christie ever published a Miss Marple novel, Eberhart wrote romantic crime fiction with female leads. Eight of her books, including While the Patient Slept and Hasty Wedding (1938), were adapted for film. Elected a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master in 1971, Eberhart continued publishing roughly a book a year until the 1980s. Her final novel, Three Days for Emeralds, was published in 1988.