"The American Agatha Christie," as she is sometimes called, Mignon G. Eberhart has a huge following among mystery buffs. Her adroit style and penchant for chilling atmosphere are evident in The Patient in Room 18, her literary debut of 1929. It introduces the emphatic Nurse Sarah Keate, who helped popularize mystery novels and movies set in hospital wards amid the ominous gleam of medical instruments. Eberhart once said of the redoubtable, red-haired Nurse Keate, "I loved her because she had a good sharp tongue." The head nurse needs all her wits in The Patient in Room 18, which begins off-duty with an unpleasant dinner party and mixes radium with murder, drawing in the cunning Detective O'Leary, beautiful Maida with the lapis lazuli cufflinks, and sinister Corole.

On a blustery February day Sarah Keate arrives at a gloomy mansion to nurse old Adolph Federie, bedbound after a stroke. Meeting the patient sets off an alarm inside her, but fleeing the house is impossible. The redoubtable red-haired nurse is stuck there with a strange coterie and a black cat named Genevieve. Originally published in 1930, a year after her debut mystery novel The Patient in Room 18, While the Patient Slept strengthened Mignon G. Eberhart's hold on fame.

The Sand Hills of Nebraska, where Mignon G. Eberhart lived as a newlywed, inspired the setting of this 1930 chiller. Smack in the middle of the rolling desolation is Hunting’s End, a weekend lodge owned by the rich Kingery family. To that place socialite Matil Kingery invites a strange collection of guests—the same people who were at the lodge when her father died of “heart failure” exactly five years ago. She intends to find out which one of them murdered him. Posing as another guest is the dapper young detective Lance O’Leary. At his recommendation Matil has engaged Nurse Sarah Keate to care for Aunt Lucy Kingery at Hunting’s End—not a pleasant assignment, as it turns out. Gathered at the lodge, Matil’s guests are shut off from the outside by a November snowstorm. A collie named Jericho mopes around, and a stray cat seems to herald new, clearly unnatural deaths. What a trap to spring on people used to good wine and fresh-cut flowers at dinner! Nurse Keate is the same sharp-eyed, stiletto-tongued, strong-stomached Nightingale and sleuth who was introduced in The Patient in Room 18 and While the Patient Slept (available in a Bison Books edition). She helped establish Mignon G. Eberhart as a mainstay of the golden age of detective fiction.

Nurse Sarah Keate, the amateur snoop who made readers of The Patient in Room 18 and While the Patient Slept shudder, is back in stand-up-to-the-devil form. Now she supervises the third floor of a metropolitan hospital. From the landings of a walnut stairway, unlighted for the sake of economy, she can see everything going on. She generally uses the stairs instead of the lurching cagelike elevator, but one sweltering summer night—! Let her tell the strange story of a body where it shouldn’t be, and no body where it should have been. From This Dark Stairway, originally published in 1931, belongs to the golden age of detective fiction. Some suspiciously stylish people, a formula for a superior anesthetic, an antique Chinese snuff-bottle that Philo Vance would have coveted—these elements come together classically and chillingly.

Murder by an Aristocrat is a book

Another vintage Nurse Keate mystery by Mignon G. Eberhart, Wolf in Man’s Clothing takes Sarah to a gloomy mansion in the remote Berkshire Hills. She nurses a young man with fatal connections to some poisonous people stuck at the scene—privileged people who are used to getting their way and are unprepared for Sarah.

The eminently capable Sarah Keate is an impeccable nurse. But when one of her patients, the handsome Lieutenant Parly, is found murdered in his bed, she must become a consummate detective as well. A top-notch mystery novel—out of print for several years—by a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master.