Jane Arden Registered Nurse

Book 2 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1956

Cover illustration by Victor Kalin

For three years Jane Arden had put her career before the only man she’d ever wanted. And now, when she was ready to combine the two, she discovered that this high-flying jet pilot had his head in the clouds, and his eyes on another girl. Jane had always claimed that a nurse was also a woman. Now she would have to prove it …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“As you must know, your sister is employed. Most commendable in one so beautiful.”

“There’s no reason why she should slave, when she’s so ornamental.”

“I thought from the first minute we met that I wouldn’t mid dying if little Jane could be  my nurse and I could die in her arms.”

REVIEW:

As we pick up with Jane Arden, she has just completed her training and is looking around the world to decide what to do next. Her longtime young man, David Hyatt, is in Florida flying jets for the military, and it happens her haughty, self-centered older sister Roberta, who works as a model, lives in Miami, so Jane decides to surprise David by going to visit Roberta for a two-week vacation, and popping in to visit. David had never been wild about Jane enrolling in nursing school, feeling that he should be her “job”—so you not will be shocked to find out that he is also not pleased to find that Jane is in town, and he tells her that he has no time to see her. This gives Jane some pause about her relationship with David, but nowhere near enough.

In the meantime, Jane is hanging out with Nicky Powers, an artistic gadabout who is the nephew of millionaires, on whose estate the three are living. He’s actually the most interesting character in the book, and by far the most witty—all the Best Quotes above are from his lips; his only serious flaw is that he unfailing calls her “little Jane.” Jane, her heart mistakenly committed elsewhere, has no interest in Nicky but does like him a lot—and he of course is in love with Jane. To help pass Jane’s time, Nicky’s aunt Julia Friedmont has a convenient stroke, so Jane can step in to manage her care, extending her vacation indefinitely. Eventually David condescends to see Jane, and is cool to her, but Janes continues her unswerving and unexplained devotion to David; though “David had grown more and more surly,” “her heart seemed almost bursting with love.” Go figure.

David is working hard at his own career, which includes dating his commanding officer’s daughter, and he has failed to mention to that young lady that he’s engaged to Jane. After many, many pages of bad behavior from David—indeed, we see him demonstrate not one admirable quality—Jane and her friends drive out to see him, who based on the afternoon’s visit finally decides that Jane is the gal for him, and insists that they get married immediately. “She did hesitate, but only for a moment. Why should there be any uncertainty about her own love?” Well, any reader who’s been paying a modicum of attention could outline a goodly number of reasons why she should run screaming—and to add to the list, he demands “harshly” that she give up nursing. “I have to come first with the girl I marry,” he says. Jane thinks, “David would never be able to understand that nursing  meant as much to her as flying did to him,” and then agrees to marry him as soon as he gets back from this cross-country flight he has to make on an experimental aircraft, which I am absolutely positive is going to go off without even a hint of turbulence. “She must never let him know how big a sacrifice she had made,” she decides, and basically pins all her hopes on his eventually changing his mind: “Given time, he might come to see how important her nursing was to her and that it had nothing to do with her love for him.” Good luck with that. Even Roberta, who is never really kind on a day-to-day basis but comes through when the boys are treating her kid sister badly, is concerned that Jane is rushing into marriage with a man who has treated her “pretty shabbily.”

Back at the mansion, though, she’s realizing she has no time to plan a wedding that is so soon that her own parents can’t make it, and she’s having second thoughts—121 pages after the reader has seen the writing on the wall. She ponders whether she should tell David that she won’t give up working? No, let’s not get totally crazy. Instead she decides she will tell David they need to postpone the wedding and have a serious discussion of their plans, and that she’s going home and he must transfer to a base closer to her. Before she has a chance to demonstrate that she really can stand up for herself, even in this limited way, she is given the easy way out when David’s plane crashes and he is killed. Two pages later she’s headed home, with Nicky flying her there on his own plane (he’s a military veteran himself)—and that’s the end, to be continued in Jane Arden, Staff Nurse, and four more Jane Arden novels after that.

It’s hard to imagine that there is going to be all that much more to say about Jane Arden, who at this point in her life has proven herself to be shallow and immature with a shocking lack of self-knowledge, incapable of personal growth. In fact, we instead hear a lot about Jane’s promise to David, made as she was starting nursing school, “not to change”—despite the fact that “three years had changed him” into a “new David whom she felt she scarcely knew,” a “snob.” “If David were really like that, he could not be the man she wanted to marry, or the kind of man she could love”—the man she did with little hesitation agree to marry in the penultimate chapter. In this book Jane has proved herself to be thoroughly stunted as a human being, and the reader is left with all the frustration inherent in following such a person as they fail again and again to know their own mind, let alone say what they really think and follow through with action. There are five more Jane Arden books to go, and at this point I’m not optimistic they are going to improve.

A Nurse to Marry

By Patti Carr 

(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1967

 

There should have been nothing unusual about a young, handsome multi-millionaire having a hobby. But in Nicholas Meers’ case there was. His hobby was collecting wives—and number five had already cost him a lot more than he bargained for … physically, emotionally and financially. As a nurse, Carol Drake felt sorry for the man. As a woman, she felt confused. And as the rumors began to fly that she would be the sixth Mrs. Meers, she felt herself becoming inextricably involved in a case that could not only destroy her career, but her dreams of happiness—forever.

 

GRADE: D+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Money puts one above the bother of being polite.”

 

“Hal Brent ordered: ‘Pucker, please.’ ”

 

REVIEW:

It’s not often you get to meet such a collection of nutcases in a single novel, all of them passed off as normal human beings. Our own heroine, Carol Drake, proves herself to be rather unsympathetic right off the bat when she is rudely condescending to her nurse roommate, who’s having a hard time with nursing. According to the all-knowing Carol, Pat isn’t cut out for the profession because she was raised by well-off academics; farm-raised girls like herself, Carol thinks, are best suited for nursing. So when Pat sighs that it’s hard taking care for terminally ill patient, sympathetic Carol snaps, “Be a play nurse in some ad for Noxema if you want just the uniform rather than the work.” I’m not sure why the author felt this would be a helpful addition to the character’s backstory.

 

As the book opens, Carol has been sent to deliver papers explaining a potential business deal to multimillionaire Nicholas Meers, who will only see “dollies” and not bankers like Carol’s fiancé Hal Brent, who is desperate to obtain Meers’s backing. Meers is so outrageously out of touch with the real world that upon arriving at the bench on his estate where she is waiting for him, he tells her, “Presently, I may converse with you. I’ve not made up my mind.” So the pair sits in silence until her pressing schedule forces her to hand over the papers. During their ensuing short conversation, he can’t remember the names of his wives, refers to himself in the third person, and tells her, “I permit women to smoke in my presence.” Her impression of him, therefore, is that “he’s young, fairly attractive, and very rich,” and she can understand why so many women want to marry him. And so the rumors that she’s to be his sixth are born.

 

And when the otherwise perfectly healthy Meers is admitted to the hospital for some unspecified tests that will take weeks, Carol gets the job of specialing him. She doesn’t have much to do, since there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with Meers, and though talk swirls of a desperately needed psych consult—ordered after Meers attempts to shoot himself in the head and misses—it never materializes. But while on the job, she learns that Helen Meers, the current wife, has some unspecified hold on her husband that makes him incapable of divorcing her. He’d like to, we are told, because when he attempted to assault her, she fought back with a hard blow to the solar plexus that left him gasping. This is presented as the crowning evidence of Helen’s deviousness, regardless of the fact that this is a pretty clear-cut case of self-defense. Then Carol is sent on a three-day drive to Vancouver to retrieve an envelope from Meers’s safe, which he instantly shreds the minute it’s delivered into his hands back at the hospital.

 

But what the document was is never revealed. It’s presumed to have been a will, but who cares? Mrs. Meers’s hold over her husband also vaporizes when he offers her a divorce and a paltry $100,000 or enforced residence at one of his homes in India; apparently living in any other of his many homes makes her guilty of abandoning him, and never mind that Mr. Meers has no intention of living in India himself, so if she were there, the pair would still be separated. Carol, for her part, advises Mrs. Meers, “All you have to do is be a proper wife to Mr. Meers. He needs someone who cares about him.” Um, sure. That and a lengthy stay at a psych hospital.

 

But it’s all moot on the very next page, when Mr. Meers, now out of the hospital, succeeds with his second suicide attempt, a drowning at sea. So what’s the point of the story? Damned if I can figure that out, so this book, annoying at the outset, just remains true to form straight through to the end. As with Ms. Carr’s other book, TV Nurse, I didn’t care for the characters and couldn’t even really find much of a plot worth pursuing. Don’t waste your time with this irritating throwaway.

Nurse at the Castle

By Joanne Holden (pseud. Jane Corby), ©1965

It was surprising how much courage it took to walk into the bedroom of someone who has tried to choke you, Nancy thought. But she need not have worried. Lavinia Barclay was her usual friendly self and greeted Nancy cheerily. “Good morning. And to what do I owe the pleasure of this early morning visit from the doctor?” Nancy answered evasively. “I think he was invited to sleep over. That’s all.” She changed the subject. “Did you sleep well?” “Beautifully,” her patient answered. Evidentally [sic] Lavinia Barclay had no notion of what had happened the night before. And, to Nancy, this was the most frightening thing of all…

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTE:
“She practically pushed him away when his closeness interfered with her breathing.”

REVIEW:
I had some hope for this book, with cover lines that seemed to promise both Gothic and nurse novel in one. And the book does make an effort to give us a mystery of sorts, though you would have to be a complete moron—or the heroine of a VNRN—not to see exactly what is going on as early as page 22. So while this book isn’t out-and-out bad, it was hard not to feel disappointed by it.

The “castle” in question is a grandiose mansion in Tarrytown, New York, home of widowed millionaire Lavinia Barclay, who in her early sixties is too old and weak to leave her room or even get out of bed for long. Mrs. Barclay is being managed by her second cousin, John Ferguson, and Dr. Orville Lacey, who have brought in Nurse Nancy Bronson to do the actual work of caring for Mrs. Barclay. Although the doctor has said that Mrs. Barclay is “suffering from hallucinations … rapidly deteriorating, and … it was only a question of time before she would require institutional care,” Nancy quickly comes to the conclusion that all Mrs. Barclay really suffers from is too many tranquilizers and not enough nutritious food or fresh air. And it’s not just because, as Kent Milliard, Mrs. Barclay’s young and handsome lawyer, tells Nancy, “You distrust Dr. Lacey because he didn’t fall for you.”

No, she doesn’t trust the doctor because he is condescending, telling Nancy that he can’t possibly explain what is wrong with Mrs. Barclay because she just wouldn’t understand—“a nurse not being a doctor, of course.” Not only that, but he calls her “dear,” and “Nancy hated to be called ‘dear.’ ” When he catches Nancy taking Mrs. Barclay for a walk in the garden, he calls her “bungling” and refuses to explain why he thinks Nancy’s efforts to give Mrs. Barclay some minimal exercise are unacceptable. So when Nancy realizes that Mrs. Barclay is palming her medications and faking the tantrums and lethargy she displays only in front of the doctor, she keeps her mouth shut and decides to pursue her course of feeding and exercising Mrs. Barclay in secret.

In her leisure hours, Nancy is fending off advances from Cousin John and Greg Mansfield, an antiques expert hanging around the house to create an inventory of the estate’s assets. She also flirts with Kent, walks barefoot on the lawn in the rain with him, the floozy, and aks him to investigate the doctor. She also manages to completely miss the blatant hints about what’s really going on. She overhears a conversation in which John says, “As soon as Lavinia is committed and I get power of attorney, I’ll have control of the money, and Dr. Lacey will get paid off and leave town.” Instead of putting her on high alert, these words serve only to confuse Nancy, and she “stopped listening.” Not long after that, Kent tells her Dr. Lacey is an expert, having been practicing for more than 40 years. She responds by pointing out, “He would have had to be a child prodigy! Dr. Lacey is only 40 years old—or less—today.” Yet still she doesn’t seem to quite connect the dots. After Mrs. Barclay gets an injection from Dr. Lacey and shortly afterward loses her mind, attempting to strangle her, Nancy can only believe that she was wrong and Dr. Lacey correct in his diagnosis of Mrs. Barclay’s mental incapacity. It’s not only in her work that Nancy is dense; when Kent tells her, “I’ve already decided on the girl I want,” she assumes he’s talking about someone else and changes the subject. I don’t mind a small amount of suspension of disbelief, but this is taking things way too far.

I did find myself racing through the last few pages, when Nancy is packing up Mrs. Barclay for her permanent installation in the loony bin, to find out if help would arrive in time (it did!). And the last sentence—“I’ll convince you that a wife may like to work,”—scored points with me. On the whole, the book is a reasonably enjoyable read, without an overdose of saccharine. But it wasn’t really a mystery, it wasn’t really Gothic, it wasn’t really suspenseful. It wasn’t really great.

Orphanage Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1970

Young, attractive Christine Morgan became a nurse with one end in view—to work at Maple Crest, where she had been raised as an orphan after her parents’ tragic death. There were delightful youngsters in need of loving care at Maple Crest. There was also handsome Dr. Aaron Hoffman, to whom Christine lost her heart, and irrepressible “Fuzz” Kraus, who wanted her to marry him. There was a dire threat to Maple Crest from crusty old Matthew Chancellor, who owned the luxurious estate next door, and dark mystery in his beautiful granddaughter’s strange behavior. All these vivid human threads interwove in a challenge Christine had to meet—to save the place she held dear, and her chance for happiness with the man she loved.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“She wore a white uniform like most women wore a Givenchy gown.”

“Sickness of the body, she could do something about. But hunger of the heart—that was another story entirely.”

“He’d met several interesting women since coming to Bardwell. There was a cute secretary, that one nurse with the red hair and a society dish that had a cute little way of walking and talking.”

REVIEW:
Somehow, between the title and the cover, I had a feeling this book was going to be a little nauseating. Sometimes my premonitions are wrong (see Surf Safari Nurse and Hospital in Kashmir), but sometimes I am right on the money.

Without further ado, I give you Christine Morgan, the eponymous orphanage nurse. She was an orphan herself, a former resident of Maple Crest Home for Children, after her parents were killed in a car crash when she was 14. She dedicated her life to becoming a nurse and has returned to Maple Crest to assist the vintage caretaker, Sarah, in bringing up 25 fresh-faced young orphans.

The orphanage doctor, Aaron Hoffman, is a quiet, sneering guy. Naturally, Christine is in love with him. We have to be told this repeatedly early on, because the doctor has no redeeming qualities that I could see, and without all the signposts you’d never believe it.

The crotchety old millionaire next door, Matthew Chancellor, hates kids, and has a tempestuous relationship with his only relative, granddaughter Sherrill, who has quit college and just returned home to the mansion. In a shocking coincidence, at the same time a newborn baby turns up in the orphanage bushes. The label has been cut off the blanket the baby is wrapped in, yet enterprising reporter/asshole Pete Jennings tells Christine that the blanket is sold by “only five stores in the entire state.” Boy, with skills like that, Pete is going to have no trouble finding his “big story” to make his name. He’s convinced that his big break is this baby story, and he’s going to track down the mother and spill her humiliation in the papers. But since the publicity about the baby is good for the orphanage, Christine and the doctor keep inviting him in despite their dislike of him and his recurrent rudeness. (Curiously, at the end of the book when Pete finally has the facts nailed, he makes a surprising about-face for no apparent reason and opts not to publish the story after all.)

In the meantime, Sherrill offers to help out at the orphanage. Once in the door she has a tendency, sometimes during a crisis about a sick or runaway child, of throwing herself into Christine’s arms and sobbing about her grandfather, who quashed her relationship with local kid Billy White, who was later killed in Vietnam. Christine responds by confronting old Mr. Chancellor about his hatred for the orphanage, telling him—prepare yourself—“You’re afraid to come to Maple Crest. Afraid you might discover you’ve got a heart after all.”

Sherrill is becoming increasingly attached to the baby, now unfortunately named Dawn. Christine quickly comes to depend on Sherrill, and within two days of Sherrill’s arrival on the scene, Christine has no qualms at all about leaving a college dropout who can’t be more than 20 years old in charge of 25 kids and an infant while she runs off on dates with Dr. Aaron and Donald “Fuzz” Kraus, who is desperately in love with Christine. Aaron is also falling for Christine, and we are treated to endless insecurities on both sides of the relationship, which gets old mighty fast. The only thing more cloying is the syrupy language of their blossoming love: “For a moment, their eyes met and held, and when he reached out to take her hand, she reached halfway. … The pressure of Aaron’s fingers around her own was a sweet, sharp pleasure.” It gets worse, but I’ll spare you.

As the book moves to its ending, Christine declines dinner with the doctor because Fuzz has asked her out, and at the end of their date he “pulled her into his arms and kissed her soundly.” You will be as surprised as I was when he tells Christine just a few hours later that he’s in love with Sherrill and wants to marry her. His fickleness is capped only by Sherrill’s, as we learn that she was actually married to Billy White not much more than nine months previously. In a way, it’s a sad indictment of commitment and responsibility, but somehow I doubt that the author had such heavy themes in mind when she penned this throwaway.

In the event that you haven’t foreseen where this review is going (which should be about as hard to fathom as the “surprise” ending of this book), let me spell it out: Orphanage Nurse is treacly, insulting to the intelligence, and amazingly improbable. Don’t waste your time.

The Nurse Was Juliet

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1965 

Julie hated what he stood for. Change to her beloved little mountain town. Change in the way she and her doctor mother conducted their small clinic for the people of the hills. Change in her fiancé, till now the most dependable thing in Nurse Juliet’s life. And most frightening of all—change in her heart. How could she hate a man—hate everything he died—and still dream of him all the time? 

GRADE: C 

BEST QUOTES: 

“A home and a husband and children are a woman’s trinity.” 

“This is for life; not for a romantic novel.” 

REVEIW: 

When you know an author was turning out several books a month, it’s hard not to feel a little guilty for expecting more from a book than formula. But darn it, when I see the same setup again and again, I am annoyed—especially when it’s just minor aspects of the story that wouldn’t be all that tough to switch up. For example, in this Peggy Gaddis throwaway, we meet Miss Sarah, who lives in the rough-hewn cabin set at the top of a long winding path far from the nearest road—a de rigueur setting for at least one character in four of the five of her books I’ve read to date. 

In this one, our eponymous nurse hails from a small dirt-poor town in the Georgia mountains—another big stretch for Ms. Gaddis. Steve Hayden, a newspaper reporter from Atlanta, comes to town to cover a murder trial that had a change of venue to this backwater location, and from the moment she claps eyes on him, Juliet Cochran is nasty and mean beyond all reason. You see, she is furious that the name of her hometown will be forever sullied, as people will think the murder happened here rather than just the trial, and she blames Steve for this. 

Oddly, however, she is also opposed to her fiancé’s hopes of improving the place. “He’s going to do everything he can to change Haleyville, first by getting a good road to the county seat and then, no doubt, by getting a hospital over here,” she snarls. She doesn’t mind the poverty of the residents, their hardscrabble lives, their miserable and crowded living conditions, that the “girls marry before they get out of their teens, some of them before they get into their teens,” because it’s what she’s known all her life. Besides, her parents are doctors, so she doesn’t have to live that way, which makes it all just charming and quaint. 

The aforementioned Miss Sarah has a “crumpled old face” and graying hair, and she calls herself “a cross-grained old woman,” and “a battered old creature.” Juliet visits the housebound recluse every week to give her “a life-giving injection that would keep her going for another week.” (That must be some shot!) But Steve digs up a shocking secret about her: It seems that she married a very wealthy man from New York when she was 18 and gave birth to a son a year later, only to run away back to her shack shortly afterward. Steve finds the 26-year-old Gerard and brings him to meet his mother, and all is right with the world. And now for the real shock—Miss Sarah is actually just 45 years old! Apparently the hardscrabble mountain life really takes a toll on a person. 

The millionaire Gerard then sets out to upgrade Haleyville. In a matter of months, new houses are springing up all over town, the roads get paved, banks open, industries move in, and the general store starts carrying Capri pants, halters, and Bermuda shorts. If only we had this guy on President Obama’s economics team, we’d have the recession turned around in no time. Juliet begins to see that jobs are a good thing after all, although it may be the latest fashion trends that really melt her cold, cold heart. All that remains is for her to dump her fiancé and for Steve to swing by and claim his prize, and we can toss this book over our shoulders.

This book has a couple of odd moments. One is its interest in spanking, though it would not be the only VNRN to have this unhealthy obsession. “What an unpleasant creature you are! Dr. Laura, I’m afraid you didn’t spank her often enough when she was growing up,” Juliet’s fiancé says of her. A few chapters later, Steve chimes in, “For two cents I’d turn you across my knee and wallop the daylights out of you.” Juliet reacts by catching her breath with wide eyes, as if this is an actual possibility. “And don’t tempt me by saying I wouldn’t dare!” he continues. “I can’t think of anything at the moment I’d rather do! It’s way past time when somebody should have done it!” The whole idea is wrong in so many ways—from the apparent acceptability of violence against women, to treating women like children, to the hint of kinkiness to the act—that it could be an entire term paper in someone’s women’s studies class.

Then there’s the fact that Juliet and her mother have hired Aunt Jemima to do their cooking. “Mattie, vast and ebony-hued and immaculate in her dark print dress and white apron,” is constantly urging the women to eat in her honey-chile vernacular. “Miss Laura, you ain’t had a mouthful of vittles!” she scolds Juliet’s mother. “Mattie was at the stove, smiling a white-toothed welcome that split her ebony face into a happy smile … fists on her ample hips.” Like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, she’s a sympathetic and caring character, but one that nonetheless makes me wince.

This book is not Peggy Gaddis’s finest, nor her worst. She does pursue her habit of picking up certain words or phrases and beating them to death—I think she referred to “vertical” farms on at least three occasions—once was good, but enough is enough. She also hints at things that are never answered: There’s the suggestion that something happened to Juliet when she was in nursing school—“Here was a girl who had been badly hurt sometime, undoubtedly during the years she had spent in Atlanta,” Steve thinks—though we are never told what happened, or even if this is in fact the case. Juliet herself is not a terribly sympathetic character, as she is always sniping at someone, and she is called selfish by several characters, including her mother. But for its flaws, it’s pleasant enough, especially if you haven’t already read other Peggy Gaddis books.

Leota Foreman, R.N.

By Peggy Gaddis
(pseud. Erolie Pearl (Gaddis) Dern), ©1957

“I wonder what happens south of Washington Square?” That’s what vacation-bound Leota Foreman, pretty New York nurse, wanted to find out … Little did she guess how much intrigue and excitement were waiting for her in Poinsettia City, Florida. First there was Dr. Gray MacKenzie, handsome and capable … but so unfriendly. And red-haired, debonair Mitch Adcock, the local lawyer … But where did Mallory Mabry, beautiful and much-married, fit into the picture? Leota finally learned the secret behind Dr. MacKenzie’s bitterness—and with it, the answer to her own heart’s questions.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTE:
“We nurses never seem to have much time for falling in love!”

REVIEW:
With this book, the fourth VNRN of hers I have read, Peggy Gaddis’s stock continues to rise. Leota Foreman (not to be confused with previous Peggy Gaddis heroines Leona of Nurse in the Shadows or Luana from A Nurse for Apple Valley) is living in New York, three years out of nursing school, when the book opens. She’s battling her way home through an icy snowstorm, and when she gets there, she tells her roommate she’s going to Florida—“and was almost as startled to hear herself as Meg was.” So she hops a train for some small town where the living is easy and the sun is warm.

She gets off at Poinsettia City, a town of 4,000 people somewhere in the center of the state. There are no cabs, so she bums a ride at the train station from Mitch Adcock, a total stranger who turns out to be an attorney, and accepts a dinner date with him. Boy, times have changed. Checking into the town’s hotel, she—what else?—collides with Dr. Gray MacKenzie. “Doctor Sour-Puss” has “a built-in grouch, a mad on the world, himself included, and his ‘bedside manner’ is strictly nonexistent. He doesn’t want people to like him; he doesn’t want friends; he’s strictly for himself alone!” according to the desk clerk, 18-year-old Taffy, who is inclined to say things like, “Well, don’t flip your toupee, pal.” Taffy is obviously pining for Mitch—“If you’re getting ready to send Mitch into a swoon, you needn’t shoot the works,” she tells Leota before her date with him—but even having experienced the good doctor’s bad humor, Leota nonetheless tells Taffy to relax: “Dr. MacKenzie is much more my type.”

That night, he is indeed pounding on her door—but only to enlist her medical aid. The hotel chef, an Italian-speaking cordon bleu, has stabbed an assistant for the fourth time because the Hollandaise curdled. Leota helps the doctor reassemble the assistant, and the doctor talks the sheriff out of hauling Caesar off to jail. Based on her expertise in this case, Leota is recommended to care for aging Jemima Mabry, a millionaire who is dying of incurable cancer despite Dr. MacKenzie’s best efforts.

Dr. MacKenzie continues to play hot and cold with Leota. One minute he is sneering at her and dismissing her with his eyes. He asks her to lunch and then, when she asks why a fine doctor such as himself lives in Poinsettia City, says it’s none of her business, and “the tone made the words hurt like a fist plunged into her face.” But Leota takes the high road: “A nurse wouldn’t dare dislike a doctor; it’s forbidden in her training rules,” she says to him. She seems to like him only because he is a competent doctor, replete with “fine surgeon’s fingers,” which she tells him repeatedly. He soon reveals he is falling in love with her—though you would never guess it from his behavior—but can’t have anything to do with her because he was executing some unnamed experiment on his mentor, a brilliant oncologist, at that doctor’s insistence, and the doctor died. “I could never ask any woman to share a life that I have no moral right to enjoy,” he says.

Then Mallory Mabry, who after her divorce “requested and obtained the use of my maiden name”—and how nice of the courts to grant it, too—peels into town in a white Jaguar and snugly fitted Capri pants. She is “a saber-toothed tiger, man-eating variety,” and Miss Jemmy’s closest living relative. Poinsettia City is clearly not her scene, but she’s run out of money and is in town to collect more from her aunt. Before Mallory has a chance to drop by the hacienda, however, Miss Jemmy dies peacefully in her sleep. Her will gives her house and fortune to Dr. MacKenzie to start a hospital in town, but naturally that’s not going to stand unchallenged. Dr. MacKenzie’s medical competence and Miss Jemmy’s mental fitness are held up to withering scrutiny in court, and the suspense—will they emerge sparkling and whole?—is unbearable.

This is the first VNRN I have read in which the heroine is the one who puts on the moves. “Leota stepped close to him and put her arms about him and held him.” “Deliberately she leaned toward him, framed his startled face between her palms, and set her mouth on his in a long, lingering kiss.” A few pages later, young Taffy proposes to Mitch (never mind that he’s a dozen years older than her): She tells him she loves him, and he answers, “What am I going to do with you?” “You could marry me,” she replies. It also ends on a strange note: Miss Jemmy’s other nurse, a confirmed spinster, trips over a spooning couple at Miss Jemmy’s house, and there dawns a “sudden bleakness in Miss Emma’s eyes,” and in the book’s final sentence she “walks silently from the room.”

The book does a nice job of painting a scene of a particular place and time, and the lesser female characters, Taffy and Mallory, are spicy and enjoyable. If the romantic relationships in the book are not very satisfying, at least they don’t take up too much of the reader’s time. And while the ending is not hard to predict, other unique aspects of the book make up for that. It really puts you in this particular time and place, and on the whole this is a very pleasant book and worth reading.