From “one of America’s favorite writers”: When a member of an aristocratic family takes a bullet, a nurse and amateur sleuth investigates (Mary Higgins Clark).
Nurse Sarah Keate is no stranger to mystery. An intrepid redhead with a biting wit, Nurse Keate has solved conspiracies and murders in places as varied as her once-sleepy hospital ward, a gothic mansion, and the Sand Hills of Nebraska. But what she encounters with the Thatchers is a new breed of deadly. The Thatchers are as close to aristocracy as an American family can get, and one of their own requires Keate’s care for a suspicious bullet wound to his right shoulder—a relative insists it was self-inflicted.
When the convalescing man dies under even stranger circumstances, Keate knows that he was murdered. And what’s worse, there is no doubt that the murderer resides in the Thatcher mansion. As the family closes rank and struggles to keep its darkest secrets buried, Nurse Keate will stop at nothing to find the truth.
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.