This image is the cover for the book From This Dark Stairway, The Sarah Keate Mysteries

From This Dark Stairway, The Sarah Keate Mysteries

This classic mystery “could rob at least one night’s sleep. . . . The scene is laid in a hospital and the things that happen there are terrifying in the extreme” (The New York Times).

Nothing gets past the vigilance of Sarah Keate, head nurse on the third floor of Melady Memorial Hospital, a wing devoted to the wealthiest class of patients. Except one hot July night, she is startled to discover a patient has gone missing. And not just any patient, Peter Melady, grandson of the hospital’s founder and head of the Melady Drug Company. During her frantic search, Nurse Keate stumbles upon the bloodied corpse of Dr. Harrigan, who was to perform the missing patient’s surgery that very night.

It’s a mystery as baffling as it is terrifying, made worse by the bumbling police officer on the case. Good thing the keen mind of Nurse Keate is gathering details, from the mad whispers heard moments before the murder to the antique Chinese snuff bottle Peter Melady demanded she retrieve before his disappearance. Nothing escapes Sarah’s shrewd notice, not even the cold-blooded calculations of a killer.

Mignon G. Eberhart

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.

Open Road Media