Patient in Room 18 / While the Patient Slept

"The mystery and horror are well sustained until the very end of the book. . . . It is a good, creepy yarn with plenty of thrills."-New York Times. "It can be guaranteed to give three hours complete and refreshing absorption."-Nation. "The story is one of the best of its kind. . . . The suspense is sustained, the action is rapid, but the genuine atmosphere of the hospital and of a lot of thoroughly credible people going through a harrowing experience is skillfully preserved. And there is no hanky-panky about the evidence."-Saturday Review of Literature. "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. Mignon Good Eberhart was born in 1899 in Lincoln, Nebraska, and now lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. She received the Grand Masters Edgar award from Mystery Writers of America in 1970. Another early classic featuring Nurse Keate, While the Patient Slept, is also available as a Bison Book