This image is the cover for the book While the Patient Slept, The Sarah Keate Mysteries

While the Patient Slept, The Sarah Keate Mysteries

The “timing and gothic atmosphere are second to none” in this classic mystery where “the suspense steadily builds . . . until the satisfying denouement” (Publishers Weekly).

From the moment nurse Sarah Keate arrives at the gloomy mansion of Adolph Federie, she senses trouble afoot, from the mysterious occupants of the house to the penetrating stare of a black cat named Genevieve. But Mr. Federie has just suffered a stroke and needs a live-in aid and Sarah is not one to shirk her duties.

When a murder occurs in the same room as her patient, Sarah starts investigating along with the help of a local police officer. But how will she sleep at night knowing she’s sharing a house with a killer?

“This is Mrs. Eberhart’s second mystery story, and it is even better than her first.” —The New York Times

“A first rate thriller. Federie House, with its sombre ruggedness on an almost deserted road, with its mysterious turrets, its darkened draperies, its heavily carpeted floors, and its sinister occupants, is an almost perfect setting for a mystery story.” —Saturday Review of Literature

“[While the Patient Slept] places detective fiction on a higher level than ever before.” —Bookman

“Eerie it is, as eerie can be, and a good yarn to boot.” —Outlook

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