Nurse in Jeopardy

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1967

Beautiful Nurse Mavis Eaton had come to the quiet seacoast town to develop another talent: painting. But she was soon deeply enmeshed in a strange and terrifying struggle that involved a handsome young doctor and a brilliant mysterious stranger.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I declare that half of my practice is tending to summer incompetents. They come down here and stay out in the sun until they’re boiled lobster red, work in their gardens until they get heart attacks, overeat and get every kind of gastrointestinal complication imaginable! I wonder if they realize how much healthier they’d be if they just stayed at home and took it easy?” 

“I wouldn’t trust her with an undersize lobster.”

“Just because I happen to be neurotic enough for two is no reason I should be in a hurry to share my neurosis with some unfortunate girl.”

“Romance! It louses up everything!”

REVIEW:
Nurse Mavis Eaton is one wildly lucky nurse—her dying patient, Mrs. Maltby, bequeaths her a year’s salary and a house on the Maine seacoast, which she accepts without hesitation, though I think the ethics of that are just a bit sketchy. Her dream is to work on her painting, hopefully to develop enough during her time off from nursing to decide whether she has the talent to pursue painting professionally. Moving into the small town, she meets local GP Dr. Timothy Ryan, who somehow manages to practice medicine though he his blind, and the other medico, Dr. Bill Rutherford. “He’s tall and blond and looks like those men in the shirt ads, a real serious young man,” we learn, and soon Dr. Rutherford has convinced Mavis that working a few days at the understaffed hospital in Bristol will help her paint better when she does have time off. She also is befriended by Stephen Metcalfe, once a lawyer but now a gadabout, living in an outbuilding and renting his family house to a man from California. “I am the modern equivalent of one of those misunderstood holy men—the hermits,” he tells Mavis modestly. He has a propensity to say absurd things like, “I am the lonely ghoul of the Metcalf estate, abhorred by all and sundry in the village.” If he talks like that to them, it’s no wonder.

Other locals include German-born John Ulrich, who moved to Maine before World War II. He is known to have been a Nazi sympathizer and is suspected by the locals of assisting the Nazis. “You know they caught a lot of spies that arrived here on the Maine coast from a submarine. But they had to have someone here to help them; someone they could trust. And I always thought John Ulrich was that man!” her cleaning woman tells her. Upon meeting Mavis, John says that prowlers are sneaking around his house and gives her a tin box with photos of his family and a newspaper in German that he says holds notices of his brother’s death in World War II, and asks her to keep it for him and mail it to his sister in Germany if he dies. Sure, she says, because she takes everything that total strangers give to her. Soon there are footsteps in the snow outside her house … what else could it be except that someone is coming after Ulrich’s box! Maybe it’s Hans Heinke, another local expat German, who was a prisoner in the German concentration camps during the war. Discussing John with Hans, Mavis thinks “his attitude toward John Ulrich remained very strange,” because it’s difficult to understand why a Nazi sympathizer might be disliked by someone who was in a concentration camp. “Hans still has a sort of complex from being in that concentration camp. It leaves a mark on a man. In his case, he takes a pretty downbeat view of life,” Steve tells Mavis. Hmmm, I wonder why?

Soon Steve is dropping unpassionate kisses on Mavis, who is not reported to have much feeling about the matter; she seems to have more response to a kiss from Dr. Rutherford. All that is essentially parenthetical to the story, and halfway through the book John Ulrich is bludgeoned to death. Now the question of who did it takes over the book. Mavis “wouldn’t want to cause trouble” by pointing out to the police that the dead man’s last word was Hans’ name, but Dr. Rutherford prevails upon her to tell the cops this and the fact that John had given her a box, which they promptly come to collect. Everyone falls under Mavis’ suspicion, and for the rest of the book we are either following her around the hospital or casting nervous glances at the neighbors.

Neither the mystery nor the romance held much interest for me. Few of the clues that Mavis considers are ever satisfactorily explained away, and the holes in the story are many and large. Even the mystery about what Mavis is going to do with her life remains unclear; at one point she decides, “She wouldn’t become a great artist overnight. It was going to take long months and perhaps years for her to perfect a technique individual enough to make her mark in the roughly competitive art world,” a realization that should have been obvious from Day One, but even with this idea suddenly dawning on her, she never declares what her ultimate career intentions are. Her final choice for a boyfriend is not satisfying and frankly doesn’t really even make sense to me, since just pages earlier she had been convinced the man was involved in the murder. Dan Ross, here writing as Rose Dana, has never been one of my favorites, and this book did little to change my opinion.

Registered Nurse

By Paul Ernst, ©1960

Nurse Carol Bond was a witnessed to death! She had arrived at the scene of the accident seconds after the two cars had crashed head-on. The victims—wealthy George Caldwell and his lifelong friend, Henry Ebon—died a few minutes later. But which man died first? To the heirs the answer was worth $1,500,000. But to Carol it marked to the beginning of frightening events that threatened her career-- and her life. For someone who would stop at nothing—even murder—put this pretty young witness into a very well-built frame.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“This was a girl who could carry her own suitcase and handle her own hysterics.” 

REVIEW:
The inside cover blurb for this book declares it “combines suspense and romance in a compelling novel,” and this is a very accurate description. Front and center is a mystery about who is trying to frame Nurse Carol Bond, while in the background a romance blooms between Carol and a young attorney trying to clear her name. Throughout we are treated with some really fine writing by an author who was known for penning the original 24 Avenger novels. At the end of the day, though, it’s more mystery than romance, so I feel compelled to mark it down slightly. 

Nurse Carol Bond is on her way home from work as a private duty nurse on the evening shift when she happens upon a car crash. Two men from one of the cars lie on the pavement, rapidly shuffling off this mortal coil. There is another woman who pops up to help Carol tend the victims, who are both dead within 15 minutes of her arrival. But who died first? And why would anyone care? Well, one of the men, George Caldwell, was a very wealthy businessman, while the other, Dr. Henry Ebon, was his not-so-rich best friend. Caldwell’s will leaves his very large estate to Dr. Ebon, but if the doctor predeceases him, the estate goes to his extended family. And Carol is quite certain that Caldwell died first, of a sucking chest wound.

The next day, a delivery boy drops off a luxurious mink stole at Carol’s apartment. Carol’s best friend Arlene—the wise-cracking, smartass type—tries to help Carol figure out who might have given to her: “I’ve got it. A grateful patient. Someone whose fevered brow you’ve cooled recently.” A few days later, Carol receives a notice from the bank in the mail stating that her account has been credited with a cash deposit of $1,000. What could all this be about? Summoned to Caldwell’s attorney’s office that afternoon, it quickly becomes clear: Someone who might have benefited from Caldwell’s estate is using these anonymous gifts to throw suspicion on Carol’s testimony. The attorney for Dr. Ebon’s estate, Andy Stewart, quickly comes to appreciate Carol’s veracity, and her figure. Soon he is leading to chase all over town for clues and suspects, with Carol acting as Dr. Watson.

It really is a very entertaining book, with excellent writing from the first paragraph: “Cocked up at a crazy angle was a single beam, piercing the midnight sky like a slanted finger.” Carol is a sturdy, competent character, who “did not have that nice firm little chin for nothing.” She can figure a few things out for herself and isn’t just led around by Andy in their pursuit of the truth and the guilty party. The answer to the mystery is not easily deduced, and the plotting moves along at a good pace, but not so fast you can’t follow each development. Again, my only real problem with the book is that the romance is the most predictable and boring aspect of it, revealed in fairly plain prose such as “Carol was beginning to think that perhaps they added up to something more than average.” And I really wish we had spent a lot more time with bestie Arlene, who was by far the most interesting character in the book. If you are looking for a VNRN that is not at all the usual fare, this book exactly fits that bill, and if the ending is sealed with a charming kiss, we can only wish that there had been more of that elsewhere in the book.

Nurse Jean’s Strange Case

By Arlene Hale, ©1970
Cover illustration by Charles Gehm

Nurse Jean Reese took her new job at Webb House with some misgivings. The somber old mansion at Shadow Lake was a house of menace. Each of its occupants seemed to have a secret life—a private, closely hidden world not to be shared. In Jean’s life, too, there was a secret: a lost love which had left her sick at heart. For a time, things seemed as hopeless as they were frightening—until, one day, an exciting stranger appeared at Webb House. And Jean once again knew the brightness and warmth of love.

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“To be needed was important to anyone. But it had become especially important to her. Because of Michael Blaine.”

REVIEW:
Jean Reese has been working at a hospital in the city when she gets a call from Dr. Paul Hartford, the kindly old GP in her hometown. He’s the latest in a string of physicians to care for recluse Leoma Webb, who tumbled down the stairs at her family mansion and is now confined to a wheelchair. Leoma used to live a happy life in Chicago, maybe even with a boyfriend (this point, among many small other mysteries, is never made clear to us), but she was called home by her father when her mother died a year ago, and then the unfortunate accident kept her there. Now Leoma lives with her father, Nathaniel; her evil cousin Quentin, who torments everyone in the house yet is allowed to continue living there; and Chad, Leoma’s “youngest” brother, who is about 20 years younger than she is. (If there’s another brother, we never hear about him, for which we can probably be grateful.) It’s a nutty cast of characters: Chad wanders the estate grounds tootling on a flute, and Leoma is a neurotic who, we are repeatedly told, is minutes from collapsing into mental illness, up multiple times during the night despite repeated doses of sleeping pills—this woman manages to shake off enough barbiturates to kill a horse.

Jean has taken this job, though she’s heard stories since childhood about the spooky Webb mansion and the weirdoes who live there, because her old beau, Michael Blaine, still lives in town. She broke up with him a year ago because he refused to get serious (read: pop the question), and she’s been pining for him ever since. It’s hard to understand why, though, because he’s an arrogant, self-centered ass. He’s working on a deal to buy the Webb estate and sell it to a group of developers, but Nathaniel Webb is so difficult to get a meeting with, how will he ever get his foot in the door? Then the gas station attendant clues him in that his old girlfriend is working at the house, so he calls up Jean to ask her out. But when Nathaniel refuses to allow any visitors inside the gates, Michael tells Jean he will not go out with her unless he can pick her up at the front door “like any civilized man would do”—never mind that a civilized man doesn’t use his old girlfriend to pull off a business deal.

The irritating part is that Jean, the dope, falls for it, and tells Nathaniel that she’ll quit her job if Michael isn’t allowed to come to the house. Nathaniel, of course, acquiesces, but Michael isn’t satisfied with just getting inside the house—now he’s pushing Jean to get him a meeting with Nathaniel, and she still doesn’t get it. “If she refused him, he would be angry and she didn’t want that,” so off she trots, but this time Nathaniel puts his foot down. For the rest of their date, Michael is cold and distant, but he couldn’t be using her, no, “she wouldn’t think that!”

Then Dr. Hartford is abruptly fired from Leoma’s case for suggesting to Nathaniel that Leoma needs to be institutionalized for round-the-clock psychiatric care, and Dr. David Williams enters the scene. He’s not one to be impetuous, “except for right now, this moment—” and he’s kissing Jean. “Could a man fall in love with a girl he had seen only a few times? He laughed at himself. The answer was so obvious. Yes, he could. Because he had!” Ugh.

Meanwhile, Leoma is becoming increasingly unhinged, spending most of her time crying and moaning, while Chad spends his days diving in the nearby pond, searching for some evidence that Nathaniel killed his wife; could this be what Quentin is blackmailing Nathaniel with?

As if this “mystery” isn’t enough, the book desperately wants to be a gothic tale, with references on virtually every other page about how “eerie” and “oppressive” “that evil place” is, “a giant black spider” with “a shadow over it,” “crouching there on the lake’s edge like a huge brown animal ready to pounce,” where “hate lurked in every corner.” Jean “felt chilled to the bone after a few days in the Webb house”; “she was beginning to feel like a prisoner in some kind of a bewitched house.” OK, OK, we’re all really scared now! But no, we’re not getting off that easy, we’re going to have to overdose on fear as well: “her bright eyes were frightened,” “her eyes still filled with terror,” “she couldn’t find any basis for the kind of fear she felt. It was a cold little gnawing inside. A little shiver along her nerves.” I guess the reason you have to be beaten over the head with all this tedious description is because otherwise, you wouldn’t see it at all. But would that have been a bad thing? If nothing else, it would have made for a shorter book.

Roxanne, Company Nurse

By Zillah K. Macdonald with Josie Johnson, ©1957
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett

When pretty young Roxanne McRae gave up a glamorous post in a large New York hospital to become Assistant Nurse at the Hudson Sugar Refinery—a job with broad responsibility for the welfare of a big company—she did not realized she would be plunged into—
Danger—the hazards of a huge plant where safety measures are few and injuries many and terrible …
Romance—with Anthony Polk, young general manager—handsome, charming, and sometimes infuriating …
Intrigue—when the accident rate at the plant rises suddenly, Roxanne decides to play detective and finds herself caught in a mysterious and frightening situation …

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“Putting on a cast was surely indicated. And that meant teamwork of the finest kind with the attending surgeon.”

“Men patients always thought they were dying.”

“These new-in-America patients are just children. They can’t wait to rip the bandages off and show the wound, and every dirty finger in the neighborhood starts pawing over it. The idea of asepsis is nil. Never been taught.”

REVIEW:
Roxanne, Company Nurse purports to be something of a mystery. The mystery is what the authors were thinking, or if they were thinking at all, when they penned this throwaway. At the book’s opening, Roxanne McCrae is a float nurse at St. Agatha’s hospital in upstate New York, and has just gotten stuck working her third weekend in a row. But then a new patient who works at the nearby sugar refinery is brought in. He’s left his watch on a windowsill at the plant, and asks Roxanne to go and get it for him. So off she trots to retrieve it, and in short order she’s been offered a job there and is working the day shift—no weekends!

Almost at once, as we are alerted by the back cover blurb (above), Roxanne is plunged into a frightening situation … she’s in a basement room of the factory when the lights go out. She hears a swishing sound, and a voice cries, “Let me out!” She panics, flails around, and then, when the lights come back on, runs into Anthony Polk, the company owner’s son. He shows her the way out, and that’s the end of that.

Except it’s not: The book keeps wondering about this scene: what was the swishing sound, who cried out, who turned out the lights and why? Eventually we learn it was a parrot who was speaking, but whose parrot? Then, when we discover (I am sorry to say) several talking parrots, which one is the guilty parrot? Why was it there? Did it drop the cigarette butt that Roxanne found on the cellar floor? Around and around, until you’d just like to bash that bloody parrot’s head in for involving you in this endless navel-gazing.

Would that were the only mystery in play here. Why is the accident rate going up at the plant? Why do most accidents happen at 11 a.m., when Anthony Polk makes his tour of the plant? Why are all the workers thinking they’ll lose their jobs if they come to the infirmary with their bleeding gashes? What does the factory reporter know? Why does the injured worker with the lost watch think something is wrong at the factory? Why is there a rumor going around the plant about “trouble in the Medical Division,” and why is the ten-year-old boy who hangs around the plant referring to her as the “bandit nurse”? (I wanted to know what a fourth grader is doing at a sugar factory, but that is one mystery the book left unscathed.) Even though I just finished reading this book, I can honestly say I don’t know the answer to a single one of these questions.

Roxanne is rather annoying. Early on she spends a chapter worrying that she’s lost the friendship of Mary, the nurse she works with at the infirmary, though I could see no reason whatsoever why Mary would be angry with her, unless all the obsessing was getting on her nerves as much as it was on mine. Roxanne is infuriatingly insecure, endlessly fretting about her abilities. “She herself had a sense of inefficiency and failure. What would she do if Mary and Dr. Nealley decided she had not the brains for the job?” When she’s the only medical staff on duty, she has “a curiously helpless feeling. She was quite alone. The idea that a doctor was not within call worried her.” She’s called to handle an accident on the factory floor, and “for an instant Roxanne’s knees went weak.” She is a far cry from the typical nurse heroine, who is a spunky, confident woman who will do the appendectomy herself if the doctor doesn’t pull himself together, stat!

Another of Roxanne’s irritating habits is that she endlessly poses a paragraph’s worth of never-to-be-answered questions: “Did he really know? Or was he just being kind? Had he guessed her secret?” “What did he mean? Was he just another who did not like Anthony Polk? Did they, too, resent his impulsiveness? And suffer from it? And then she remembered the call from the foreman. What was his name?” If it’s not question marks we’re being inundated with, it’s exclamation points: “Her job was here! Grandmother could drive! She must take that chance!” I expect the plethora of punctuation is meant to engender some sort of emotion in the reader, but all it induced in me was exasperation.

Then there’s her final mystery: What is up with her abrupt, inexplicable, baseless obsession with Anthony Polk, who apart from popping up in the dark room, has had little contact with her at all? Particularly since, at the beginning of the book, she finds him irritating? “If they could just sit beside Grandmother’s fire once more, she might be able to warn him. She might even try to win his affection. She was ashamed to have to own up, even to herself, that she wanted to. Nothing else in life now seemed to matter.” Seriously?

In the end, we discover that someone is trying to drive Anthony out of the factory, and the climactic scene plays a bit like that in The Nurse. Except the bad guy in this case has no gun, and when he tells Roxanne to hand over the incriminating evidence or he’ll have her fired, she actually considers giving it to him (never mind that if she exposes the plot, he’s the one who will be fired, if he doesn’t actually do time): “Her knees went weak. She reflected that his criticism might even prevent her from getting an executive position in any nursing field. He had it in his power, perhaps, to ruin her career! Temptation assailed her. Why should she jeopardize her career to right a wrong that was past, over, and done with?” She’s about to surrender when she realizes that his plot has jeopardized the health of the factory workers, and that the fundamental job of a nurse is to preserve health! So she drops the evidence into a locked drawer, and the bad guy turns and leaves. Wow, my knees are as weak as Roxanne’s after that frightening situation. How about you?

I desperately wanted to like this book, based entirely upon Harry Bennett’s fabulous cover illustration and the fact that it was originally titled Roxanne, Industrial Nurse, which rated pretty high on my camp-o-meter. But there is really nothing to appreciate inside this overlong, annoying book. Just enjoy the cover and move on to something else.

Nurse Todd’s Strange Summer

By Zillah K. Macdonald and
Vivian J. Ahl, ©1960

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Nurse Ann Todd, on a special duty assignment on the misty coast of Maine, found two men … and a mystery. There was Quint Towne, who made her pulse thump though her heart said no … And there was Dr. Bruce McNab, brilliant and lonely, shunned by the people who needed him most, blamed for some strange tragedy no one would name. As Ann struggled in the web of hate and suspicion that enmeshed the town, the tension around her tightened its grip on her heart. Then, on the terrifying, gale-lashed waves of Jericho Bay, Ann found the answer to the mystery of Dr. McNab … and the key to her own future.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“He had neither flinched nor groaned. Like his state of Maine, there was granite in him.”

“He’s a kind of measles that gets every girl who runs into him.”

“Nurses are so bossy, you know.”

“She was not blind to the value of a married-woman status in her field. There was always the idea that unmarried women didn’t know the essentials of life.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Todd’s summer, despite what you may have heard, wasn’t that strange. Ann Todd left her job at a hospital in New York to work in Maine as a private nurse to Quint Towne, a wealthy gadabout whom she had nursed after he injured his back when he fell from a horse in Central Park. She’s fallen in love with him, and is looking forward to spending the summer assisting him through his rehab. But when she arrives in his summer hometown off Jericho Bay (which is just southwest of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, if you care to know), she is met by a postcard from Quint’s mother and constant companion, Jane, who informs her that they are in Florida and will not arrive in Maine for four more weeks.

Fortunately, the town has a doctor, Bruce McNab. Soon she is working for him, drawing blood, visiting patients around town, and helping during office hours. But she discovers that the town harbors a grudge against Dr. McNab, and most of the citizens prefer to drive to a town 20 miles away for their healthcare. She thinks this has something to do with her landlady, Lett, a talented pianist who suffered a broken wrist two years ago. Lett’s hand became paralyzed after the accident, and Lett’s career was ruined. The town believes Dr. McNab, who at the time was working as an intern under the town’s previous doctor, bungled the job, and still hasn’t forgiven him. Ann is determined to save Dr. McNab’s reputation, so she sneaks a look into the doctor’s files, but the first page of Lett’s chart is missing, and she can’t find out for sure what happened. Then she tries a little physical therapy on Lett, though Lett’s sister Parthie is dead set against it. (And get used to these names; everyone in Maine is named something like Keziah, Ephraim, Llewellyn, and Lucius, perhaps because it’s such a quaint place.)

Four weeks fly by, and Quint is back and doing splendidly, so Jane tells Ann they won’t be needing her services after all. Quint starts dating her, but he’s also seeing the local artist, Mallie, sometimes back-to-back on the same night, the cad. Soon summer rolls into fall, and Ann isn’t making much headway in her campaign on Dr. McNab’s behalf. Then a huge nor’easter blows up, and wouldn’t you just know it, a young woman living out on Hen Island has come down with appendicitis. She and Dr. McNab pack up their supplies and run through the storm to save the woman’s life with an appendectomy on the kitchen table, and suddenly she’s thinking that going back to New York is going to be really difficult, because “this was the life she would have chosen.” After watching her quiver with alarm prior to the operation—“She dreaded the storm, and she was afraid of another fear, one that came unbidden and of which she was ashamed, fear of gossip if he failed! His failure would reflect on her, too; she must face that because of her association with him!”—I’m a little perplexed by this sudden transformation. 

Safely back on the mainland, Ann is met on the docks by Quint, who smooches her heartily and asks her to marry him. She briefly considers the proposal, despite having declared, just eight pages earlier, that “she was through with Quint.” The truth it that she’s falling for Dr. McNab, but since he has been spending a lot of time with Mallie, she thinks she might as well marry Quint, since “life had to be lived.” But she quickly snaps out of it and turns him down—and on their way off the dock they pass the doctor, who doesn’t even wave, to Ann’s great disappointment. He is decidedly cool after that, and spending more time than ever with Mallie, but Ann cannot connect the dots. Further evidence of her lack of sense is provided the next day at Dr. McNab’s office: A young patient bouncing on an antique sofa finds a crumpled chart in a hole in the upholstery that was pointed out to us with much fanfare 40 pages ago. Oblivious Ann takes the chart without looking at it and stuffs it into the pocket of her uniform. That night she finally reads it, realizes that is plainly shows that the previous doctor was the one who mishandled Lett’s fracture, and tucks it into the Book of Devotions that she sanctimoniously keeps on her bedside table, planning to wave it around town tomorrow to trumpet Dr. McNab’s innocence.

But then she wakes in the middle of the night by someone creeping into her room—it’s Parthie, looking quite mad and nervously twisting a scarf. She wants that chart! Ann thinks about how valuable the chart is, and how much she loves the doctor—and then promptly gives the game away by reaching for the book. Parthie gets there first, grabs the chart, and burns it to ashes. Her mission accomplished, she completely goes to pieces and confesses all: She’d done the old doctor’s books for him for years and had fallen in love with him, though he was married and had no interest in her. She had known that it was he who had botched her sister’s case, but she wanted to protect the old doctor, so she stole the chart, stuffed it into the sofa, and spread the rumor around town that Dr. McNab was responsible for the malpractice. Ann again tells Parthie that a little PT will have Lett banging out sonatas in no time flat, and this time Parthie agrees to allow Ann and Dr. McNab to treat Lett’s arm. And once she’s healed, Dr. McNab’s reputation will be saved!

All that is irrelevant, though, because in the morning, Dr. McNab gets a letter from one of the town’s leading citizens, who likes to vacation on Hen Island. He has been so impressed with Dr. McNab’s treatment of the woman with appendicitis, who is a dear friend of his, that he has invited Dr. McNab to serve on the local hospital medical board, thereby anointing him as a worthy medico. Then it’s just a few short sentences to engage Quint and Mallie, and drop Ann into the good doctor’s arms, and it’s all over.

And none too soon. Ann starts out well enough, but once Quint comes back to town, she transforms into one of the more immature heroines I’ve met. After she’s released from her job nursing Quint, she can’t bring herself to actually ask Dr. McNab to keep her on, just telling him that she’s going to have to go back to New York and, when he accepts the news with aplomb, she becomes angry that he doesn’t tell her he wants her to stay, when she can’t tell him that she wants to. She’s angry with Quint because he doesn’t take her to meet his socialite friends when they go out on dates, and decides she wants to stop seeing him. But before she can tell him this, he stops coming around: “Ann had wanted to break away from him and it had happened, but she knew now she had wanted the break to be on her own terms. She missed him.” He tells her he can’t see her because his mother doesn’t like it, and she controls his income. “Then why not get a job? she almost stormed, then remembered he was not in any condition to do that.” And her thoughts are much too frequently punctuated with exclamation points! “Ann knew both triumph and fear! Triumph that his diagnosis had been confirmed. Fear that they might be too late!” “And then, at five o’clock, the telephone did ring!” “Her courage zoomed up! They must not fail!”

The writing is otherwise bearable, but chapters are given titles, the first time I have seen this in a VNRN, and this offers an opportunity for a chuckle at chapter 15, named “Ann Shares a Fateful Moment with ‘B.M.’ ” (I’m trying to imagine that how that scene plays out.) One superlative feature of this book is its extremely descriptive depictions of medicine. We watch Ann make a bed with the patient in it, pack a mobile OR and set it up, and assist in an appendectomy, and these scenes are among the most realistic and detailed I’ve encountered in a VNRN. But apart from this, and the armchair-travel thrill of hearing mention of places you know of (if you know of Maine), you’re better off allowing Nurse Todd to navigate the northeast without you.

Nurse Paige's Triumph

Teresa Holloway, ©1972

“Tell Navy … Sara … saboteur—” The patient’s words were plain enough, but what did they mean, Paige Hayden wondered? Her father, a retired naval intelligence officer, and his successor, Capt. Hank Davis, thought they knew: “Sara” was the giant U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga, but what kind of sabotage was planned, by whom, or when, they couldn’t guess. Anyway, the top-secret mystery was none of Paige’s business… Until she found a corpse floating in the river. And then David—Dr. Dave McLaurin, the dedicated young cardiologist she loved—was kidnapped, sending the nurse on an impulsive cross-country flight to trap a traitor…

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTE:
“Next time I’ll greet you in such loungewear slinkiness that you’ll have no thought for broccoli hollandaise.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Paige’s Triumph is actually more of a mystery story than a romance, and includes two kidnappings, a gun in the glove box, theft of a top-secret explosive, and a drowned man fished from the ocean. I have to give the author a little credit for trying to make her book a little bit more than the usual VNRN, but unfortunately it wasn’t done very well, so you know exactly what’s going to happen next, and the mystery itself is so mundane that it’s difficult to care one bit. The reviewer giveth and the reviewer taketh away.

Paige works in the cardiac unit with hot and hunky cardiologist Dr. Dave McLaurin. One rainy evening she’s looking out the hospital window and sees two people struggling in a green Pontiac, one of whom is wearing a white suit. “A white suit? On a day like this?” She’s caring for a new patient who’s had a “stoppage” of his heart. The ID bracelet he wears names him as E. Dyal, and that is what everyone calls him; though he’s awake and alert and chatting with Paige, no one apparently thinks to ask him what his name is or anything about himself. She’s telling E. about her father, retired Navy intelligence, “one of the keenest and most active special agents the country had during the dangerous years after the end of World War II.” Suddenly the man rattles himself. “ ‘Navy. Tell—Navy—Sara—saboteur—’ The whisper, rasping, died in the old man’s throat. The line on the monitor, that thin thread of electronic life, died, too.”

When she gets home, she tells her father about her deceased patient, and he immediately calls two Navy intelligence officers over to the house to hear her story. It turns out there’s this aircraft carrier in the harbor called Saratoga, and some new high-tech explosive device has recently been stolen from the Navy. So the Navy starts working on the case, but Paige always seems to land—inadvertently, of course—in the middle of any actual developments, in between her dates with Dr. Dave. For starters, she’s driving home from work the next evening when she sees a body—wearing a white suit!—floating in the river. So she hops into the water, takes off her polyester pants (I am not kidding), ties them around the body (the white suit is a Navy uniform), and tows it along the embankment until she gets to a place where she can climb out again. Just as she is heaving herself over the rail, along comes a car—“unbelievably, it was Dave.” That’s not the end of the coincidences. He stays with the body while she drives off in Dave’s car to get help, wearing Dave’s raincoat—the body still has her pants—and when she returns, Dave and the dead sailor are gone. Two of the bad guys who tossed the body into the drink were out for a drive when they just happened to come across Dave and their victim and abduct them both.

Back at home, Paige gets a call from a woman working with the bad guys, ordering her to meet them in the parking lot of the hospital with some sodium pentothal. “Why sodium pentothal?” Paige asks herself. It’s an excellent question, but never mind about that, because we’ll never find out, or who the sailor was, or why he was struggling with someone in the Pontiac, or why he was killed, or even what happens to his body. Paige takes Dave’s car to the hospital, and while searching the glove box for a tissue to blow her nose, she finds a .32 instead and stuffs it in her waistband (she’s put on new pants at home). After stealing the “truth serum” from the ED, she is wandering around the parking lot when she bumps into Dave! The kidnappers have sent him out to collect the drug, so she hands it over, along with his doctor’s bag with the pistol now concealed inside. After making out with her, he blithely goes back to the kidnappers’ car. He’s not in league with them, he’s apparently just too dumb to walk away when he has the opportunity. (It isn’t until they take him back to some hospital outbuilding and he finds the pistol in his bag that he encourages them to release him.)

After lots more conversations with Navy and FBI agents, who tell her that E. worked in the laundry room at the hospital, Paige is at the bus station to buy a newspaper when she hears the same woman who called her, in the phone booth saying that she’s taking the bus to Dallas. Has anyone used the word “unbelievable” yet? Paige instantly makes a phone call, but does she contact her friends at the FBI and tell them what bus the woman is on? No, she calls the hospital to leave a message for Dave that she will call him tomorrow, and buys a ticket for the same bus. When the bus finally gets to Dallas, after repeated stops along the way during which Paige is always unable to phone anyone, she instantly loses the woman she is following. But remember, this Paige we’re talking about. “As luck would have it,” we are told, one of the FBI agents she has met literally brushes past her to the phone booth, and she hears another conversation that implicates him in this plot to blow up the Saratoga. This woman has got to start buying lottery tickets.

Back at home (she took a 747), Paige learns that the Navy is in the process of collecting the bad guys, including the traitor FBI agent. She’s on her break at work when it occurs to her that E. would have had a locker in the hospital laundry room, which may be where the missing explosive is hidden. Sure enough, all she has to do is open the locker and there it is! Those FBI agents have nothing on Nurse Paige. She stuffs the explosive—where else?—into her pants, but Paige’s luck suddenly goes sour. One of the bad guys happens to arrive just as she is walking out of the laundry, grabs her, relieves her of the rest of E.’s stuff, and locks her in a room in the basement. Unbelievably—there’s that word again—she is rescued minutes later by Dr. Dave and two FBI agents who just happened to be at the hospital when she didn’t come back from her break. She and Dave fall into each other’s arms, and the world is safe for young love and aircraft carriers again.

The coincidences just never stop with this book, and they’re so bizarre that even the characters notice; Dave sums up just a small selection of them at the end: “By a strange coincidence, Paige is there when Dyal tries to square himself with his God and his country. Then she’s at the window when the poor sailor tries to free himself of he-knows-not-what conspiracy.” The plot is totally unbelievable, but not so outrageously that you get to have a good laugh at it, except possibly for the scene where she has found a body floating in the ocean and tied it to her waist using her pants. The sabotage scenario is so removed from the story that it never really concerned me. Should I really care about this aircraft carrier? Even the romance aspect of the plot barely caused more than a riffle. Her relationship with Dave seems to be progressing swimmingly throughout the story, and the only hiccups are her insecurities—does he really love her?—and the little fight they have at the end of the book when he unexpectedly decides to join the Navy. But no worries, he gets to stay right at the same hospital where he’s always worked. It’s just not a book that elevates the pulse or the interest, for better or for worse.