A newly-engaged nurse searches for a killer among the passengers on her fiancé’s yacht, in this locked-room mystery from an Edgar Award winner.
When nurse Sue Gates agreed to join Monty Montgomery on his yacht, she knew he intended to ask her to marry him. She also knew she didn’t love him but that a marriage to the wealthy entrepreneur would give her and her aunt, whose under her care, some financial security.
But when Sue’s new fiancé goes overboard, his cries of foul play once he is rescued arouse her suspicions. When another passenger turns up dead, Sue desperately searches for a murderer lurking among the ship’s passengers.
Praise for Mignon Eberhart
“Eberhart is one of the great ladies of twentieth-century mystery fiction.” —John Jakes, author of the North and South Trilogy
“One of America’s favorite writers.” —Mary Higgins Clark
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.