Princess of White Starch

By Katherine McComb, ©1963 

Nurse Flower Palmer was young, lovely, and in love. Jimmy Scott, her fiancé, was the Prince Charming of any girl’s dream—handsome, fabulously wealthy, and very much in love with her. But there were others who were determined to do something about it. Two women in the Scott mansion hated the young nurse. And there also was the dark-haired, moody, unpredictable young doctor at the hospital, whose anger and contempt and sudden passion had shaken and frightened her. When tragedy struck, all of them pointed accusing fingers at Flower.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“You don’t think much of women anyway, though I suppose your mother was one.” 

“Who did he think he was, anyway, one of the Kennedy boys?”

“If you weren’t my best friend I’d inject air into your veins, or something.”

“All laymen think doctors and nurses have it easy, and go into shock when they get a bill for saving their lives.”

“Are you a native angel?”

REVIEW:
How awkward to have a literal flower child for a heroine. Nurse Flower Palmer, who has been at LA County Hospital since she graduated from nursing school month ago, is “no bigger than a bar of soap after a big wash,” 5 foot 2 and 110 pounds, and “just because she was small and looked sixteen instead of twenty-three nobody ever seemed to take her seriously.” Take, for starters, Dr. Lester Dean. “I was just wondering why they sent a grammar-school babysitter to take Miss Reynold’s place,” he tells her when she shows up to work the emergency department. But he is just a cynical old meanie who wishes the suicide attempt had been successful because the patient will “try it again the next time she starts feeling sorry for herself. And she’ll probably keep on until she succeeds.” He also tells a woman whose throat is slashed her husband, “It’s the inside scars that can never been healed.” Super helpful! Even better, before the shift is halfway through, he grabs her and kisses her, “hard, bruising, demanding.” She is outraged, so much so that when he asks her out to dinner she “almost said yes before she thought. Then she remembered his rudeness and shook her head.” That’ll show him! Of course, we know how this is going to go: “She had never met such an arrogant, pick-headed person, and just when she might have started liking him.” Which she will, after a lot of sparring. 

This book, like many other VNRNs, includes a natural disaster, but here the twist is that it’s on page 25, not the penultimate chapter. During the earthquake she meets a man whose legs have been broken, but good news! His nephew, Jimmy Scott, is hunky and drives a robin’s egg blue sports car. She helps get Jimmy’s uncle home, which is an ocean-front mansion in Santa Monica, and then agrees to do some part-time nursing for the man around the edges of her regular daytime job. Of course, it takes Jimmy about ten minutes to propose, though she points out the only known each other two days and it might be a good idea to get to know each other first.

All of a sudden, Flower takes a sharp U-turn away from her usual sensible and smart attitude. “She thought again, as she had many times, about leaving the hospital.” After only a month on the job? “Of course there was one way out—she could marry Jimmy Scott.” Um, yes, that’s one way out, but aren’t there may be other, less permanent options? Two months pass in a few short pages, and she’s said yes to Jimmy and given notice at the hospital. Three years of training, and she quits in three months. “You belong to me,” Jimmy tells her, “and that’s all you need to belong to.” He gives her a huge diamond ring which she refuses to take off at work, though I expected this is a little problematic when managing a Code Brown.

The only person who isn’t happy for her is that stinker Dr. Dean. “You don’t honestly believe that Jimmy Scott will allow his wife to bathe, give enemas and carried bedpans for male patients, do you?” Which was the point, of course, so it’s not exactly the zinger he might have liked. And then he kisses her again, the cad. Six more weeks quickly pass, during which Flower moves into the family manse and wedding planning proceeds apace. Suddenly Mr. Scott has a stroke, and now the wedding is off, and Flower can keep nursing, right in the comfort of her fiancé’s own home. Conveniently, Mr. Scott’s doctor goes on vacation and turns the case over to Dr. Dean, who can come over and glare at Flower on a daily basis. Unfortunately, Mr. Scott has a few more strokes, and, one day when Flower is home alone with him, he sends her off to get lunch, and when she comes back, he’s at the bottom of the pool. Almost everyone seems to think Flower has given the old man a push—everyone except Dr. Dean, of course. How will she clear her name?

Well, that’s not really important. She does, of course, and gets a man, after a stupid little misunderstanding that we really didn’t need. Overall, this is book is somewhat mixed. Flower is delightfully spicy, and tough, to boot. One irritating visitor suggests he should have the procedure so he can have her for a nurse as well. “What do you think I could have cut out, Nurse?” Flower snaps, “Your ego,” and promptly tosses the joker out of her patient’s room. But she quits nursing at the drop of a hat, so it’s hard to have a lot of respect for her after that. (Yes, it seems she’s going back to it in the end, but still, how fickle can you be?) Some parts of the story, particularly the evil plot to frame Flower, seem quite thin—but then the description of Mr. Scott’s strokes, each one whittling away a little bit more of his vitality, seemed painfully real. There are things in this book that make it worth reading—quotations from the poet Shelley among them—but it won’t be the most delicious meal you’ve ever tasted. If it’s landed in your lap, I give you permission to have at it, but you needn’t go chasing it down.

The Taming of Nurse Conway

By Nora Sanderson, ©1964

Nurse Nicky Conway already hated Dr. Peter Trenton, whom she considered responsible for her mother’s death—so that when he began to interfere with her plans for marrying Geoff Hutchinson, it was altogether too much to bear!

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“From three till six in the morning—that’s the time a night nurse feels like sitting down and writing a last will and testament.” 

“If you keep on flying into rages like this you’ll have a frightfully interesting stroke when you’re older.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nicola Conway is easily one of the most unpleasant heroines I’ve ever met. I’m not alone in this assessment—pretty much every other character in the book chews her out at one point or another, over her irrational obsessive persecution of Dr. Peter Trenton, who was on call the night her mother, in her 40s, had a stroke and died at home with Nicky in attendance, before Dr. Trenton could arrive. It’s been more than a year since the incident, and still Nicky cannot bring herself to forgive the man and move on, or even keep a less-than-overtly-hostile expression on her face when he’s in the room. Her excuse for her hatred is that Dr. Trenton has always readily agreed that if he’d arrived sooner, Nicky’s mother would have survived—but it’s also clear that there’s some secret that exonerates the good doctor, and that the only person in New Zealand (where the book is set) who isn’t aware of this secret is Nicky herself.

Unfortunately, the pair work in the same hospital and run into each other on a daily basis—and Nicky can’t help “giving Dr. Trenton hell—you know you have, in a cruel, clever way so that he can’t hit back at you,” says her former best friend Jane, who eventually—along with all the other nurses—gives Nicky the cold shoulder for her shoddy treatment of the man, who is much beloved by the rest of the staff, the patients, and every member of the community, who all but stop him in the street and ask for his autograph. The only mystery bigger than the one surrounding Mrs. Conway’s death is why Nicky hasn’t been fired for her constant maliciousness: “If I were Dr. Trenton I’d see that you didn’t last one more day on the nursing staff,” says another ex-friend nurse. “You’re just a spoiled, self-opinionated little brat! We’d all be glad to see you go.”

So Nicky says truly horrendous things to poor Dr. Trenton on pretty much every other page, and by mid-book we readers are also wishing she’d get sacked. Even when—as you know would happen—Nicky decides, “I’ve gone and been mad enough to fall head-over-heels in love with Dr. Trenton,” which seems essentially impossible given her unswerving hatred for the man, her behavior barely budges out of the appalling zone.

A large and fairly stupid subplot involves a childhood friend of Nicky’s, Geoff Hutchinson, who has fruitlessly been hounding Nicky to marry him—and who is a victim of an accident at work that blinds him. As the weeks roll by and Geoff’s vision does not recover, Nicky idiotically decides she will marry Geoff and be his full-time nurse, for reasons that are never entirely clear. Dr. Trenton is convinced that Geoff is faking his blindness, and Nicky is equally sure he is not—giving them fodder for many more exasperating arguments—but interestingly, Geoff himself is barely seen at all in much of the book despite his starring role in the impending ruin of Nicky’s life and in all her arguments with Dr. Trenton. The question of whether Geoff is rendered a helpless baby by his blindness is viciously argued on both sides by Nicky—a hypocrisy that the book itself never acknowledges—depending on who she’s talking to: She insists that Geoff is unable to fend for himself when she’s screaming at Dr. Trenton that she must go through with the marriage, and furious that her fellow nurses are “all so determined to thrust him back into the nursery! Losing their sight doesn’t make a child of anyone!”

Equally perplexing is the huge amount of discussion about Nicky donating one of her corneas to Geoff so he would be able to see, and Dr. Trenton’s refusing to allow it—then agreeing, thinking that Geoff would never agree to Nicky’s losing an eye if he is malingering—but never in all of the talk is the surgery ever discussed with Geoff himself, which would quickly put an end to the debate and at least one source of much arguing. (The whole fake-blindness plot is not a new one, either; we’ve met it in New Surgeon at St. Lucien’s, which was also published under the Harlequin imprint though by a different author, Elizabeth Gilzean.)

Throughout this overly long book, we are subjected to a “self-righteous and critical and downright conceited,” “bad-tempered and resentful” heroine (we are told several times that Nicky is a good nurse, but we never see her do any actual nursing, and even the patients think she’s “as polite as a tiger crouching to spring”). She is frequently and rightfully called a child and told to grow up, regularly makes ridiculous decisions and stubbornly clings to them, and nastily attacks a very kind and patient doctor to the point where I think she could be prosecuted for harassment, if not creating a hostile work environment. Her assault on the doctor—and by extension the patients, nursing staff, and even us readers—drags right through to the final pages, when the foolish mystery about Mrs. Conway’s death is cleared up and we learn that if everyone had just been honest from the outset, we could have been spared 189 pages of maddening irritation. It’s impossible to believe that anyone could love Nurse Conway, and at no point is she “tamed” that I can see—rather, I pity the fool who would spend a single minute more with her than they absolutely have to. Do not, dear readers, I implore you, be such a fool—leave this book on the shelf.

Nurse Nicole’s Decision

By Arlene Hale, ©1965

Also published as Private Duty for Nurse Scott

When Stella Bennett had a stroke, Nicole Scott, R.N., rushed to nurse her old friend back to health. So absorbed did Nicole become in her patient, that she began to forget her problems with Mark, her fiancé. But other complications arose in the person of two new men—the handsome nephew of her patient and the mysterious ranch manager, Lee Whitney. Suddenly all these various matters came to a head—and Nicole was forced to make the most important—and what turned out to be the most endearing—decision of her life.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Nurses get sassier every day. Used to be they all but bowed down when a doctor came into the room. Ah, those good old days!”

“I take temperatures much better than I cook.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Nicole Scott, like many VNRN heroines, is engaged. You will not be shocked, therefore, when you deduce on the second page that this arrangement is not likely to come off as planned. Mark Foster runs a hardware store, “but right now every penny was going to pay off the mortgage he had taken in order to remodel and restock. Because of this, he didn’t feel marriage was in order. ‘My wife will not work,’ Mark said emphatically.” So when author Arlene Hale tells us two pages later, “All was not as rosy as it should have been,” we were already online with Bed, Bath and Beyond to cancel that wedding gift. Page after page of their incompatibilities—he loves baseball, she does not; he is shy, she is outgoing; he’s lazy, she likes activity—are trotted out to hammer home the obvious point. Nicole continues with the charade, however, because “if you’re not careful, you’ll end up like Lorena,” her helpful mother says, holding up Nicole’s quiet, baseball-loving homebody sister Lorena, who has reached the shocking age of 25 “and no beaus,” mom says, that ignorant silly, since everyone knows the plural of beau is beaux.

But fate intervenes when Stella Bennett has a stroke and requires round-the-clock nursing care in her home. Stella’s nephew Corbin Bennett III, an old school chum of Nicole’s, comes home to help care for his aunt. A profligate, drifting young man, he nonetheless is one of the few such young men who deeply cares for his rich dowager aunt, and spends hours each day talking to her, helping with her physical therapy, and making her laugh. And a fair amount of time trying to woo Nicole, who is unimpressed with Corbin’s flighty ways. Mark, too, is not happy to see Corbin again, but to such a degree that it’s clear there’s some dark history between the two, and Mark is remaining secretive on the subject. “Let’s just say I can’t stand him and let it go at that,” he snarls, and Corbin for once has nothing to add.

While Nicole is busy caring for Stella 24/7, she asks Lorena to keep Mark company, and then when she has a day off, she heads down the road to the ranch that’s owned by Stella but managed by hunky cowboy Lee Whitney, who also drops by daily to have pleasant chats with the invalid. And maybe the nurse, too. Before long, he’s gently kissing Nicole, and she’s returning the favor, having dinner with him at his house. “How comfortable she had been there. It was as if she need be no one but her true self. She had relaxed as she hadn’t relaxed in a long time. With Mark it was sometimes like walking a tightrope. What a pleasant change Lee had been!” Yet she’s still talking about her impending marriage to Mark. That young man is not helping; after talking on the phone with Nicole’s sister and realizing that “somehow with Lorena, he could be more himself than with anyone else,” he immediately decides to rush over and propose to Nicole. Along with his declaration of love—oh, wait, rather his declaration that “I decided I’ve had enough. I don’t see why we should wait. Let’s get married,” burbles the impetuous fool—he insists that if she wants the ring, she must quit working. “I will not have you working. I want you home. Where a wife should be. You should be willing to give this up for me!” Uh, okay, she stutters, and though she does bring up his own very long hours at the hardware store, before she can get to the point he literally shuts her down—“We won’t say anything more, okay?”—and that’s the end of that. (Lee, on the other hand, is outraged when Nicole tells him of Mark’s demand: “Nursing isn’t just a job,” Lee says. “It’s a profession, a necessity, something so essential—” because we didn’t have enough hints about who the right man really was.)

Before her engagement party, Nicole finds a book of poetry on Lorena’s desk, all full of sappy odes to Mark, and now she knows that Lorena is in love with Mark, which for some reason bothers her more than the fact that she’s kissing Lee behind every closed door. Because no one can have an honest conversation with anyone, it takes a fall down the stairs that puts Lorena in the hospital with the usual coma to bring everything out: Days later, when Lorena finally wakes to see Mark sitting beside her, she says, “Hello, Mark, darling. I love you,” and goes back to sleep. In their joy that Lorena is getting better, Nicole tells Mark that Lorena is in love with him, and that he is in love with Lorena. Well, gosh, now that you mention it, he says, and Nicole runs off to find Lee. 

There’s not much to this story, just a straightforward telling of how when you throw a bunch of charged particles into a jar and shake it around a bit, eventually all the like molecules will find each other. But it’s not badly told, and gently glides along. Lee Whitney is definitely the most charismatic person in the book, a sexy, kind man who never grabs the woman and bruises her lips in an assault presented to us gullible maiden readers as a pass. Some parts of the story are maddening, like all the glaring highway signs screaming that Nicole is on the wrong road, which we realize on the second page, yet have to watch Nicole flounder for a hundred more pages until she starts to clue in. One odd side plot revolves around a woman named Elaine, whom Mark had been madly in love with before he knew Nicole, and whom Corbin had taken away from him. The two men even come to blows over it—Corbin knocks loser Mark down in two minutes flat—but neither man will discuss the reason for the fight with Nicole. Elaine’s name keeps coming up as both Mark and Nicole wonder if Mark will ever tell Nicole the story, but the last we hear of Elaine is Nicole’s resolution not to ask Mark any questions: “She would wait until Mark told her,” she decides. He never does. Interestingly, Lorena knows all about it, since, as the librarian, she knows all the town gossip, but she’s not going to enlighten Nicole, either. Is this supposed to be some metaphor for the deep understanding between Mark and Lorena’s souls that is missing in the relationship between Mark and Nicole? Because it only comes across as a major drama made out of a high school crush, and Mark’s persistent refusal to tell Nicole shows him up as an immature egocentric. It seems that poor Lorena is getting the worse end of the stick when she ends up with Mark, but at the dried-up age of 25, beggars can’t be choosers.

Dr. Holland’s Nurse

By Jane Converse, © 1963

What the gossips said about Dr. Holland’s nurse and his handsome young assistant wasn’t true … Kim Sargent was engaged to Bill Holland, a brilliant doctor much older than she. The lovely nurse admired and respected her fiancé, was sure she could be happy with him, make their marriage a success, and learn to love him as much as he loved her. Then one day a young doctor named Reid Coleman walked into her life. And Kim knew, heartbreakingly, too late, that he was the man she should have waited for!

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Pop’s comfort and Elaine’s education were being bought at the price of her probable spinsterhood. Hopeless, because by the time Elaine finished high school and nurse’s training, Kim would be in her thirties … a stranger to fun, an unlikely prospect for marriage.”

“A guy’s never interested in a girl unless she’s getting the rush act from at least six other fellows.”

“I adore you, Kim. You make such beautifully wifely noises.”

REVIEW:

Here we have yet another entry for the VNRN trope of being engaged to the wrong man, plus a devastating illness to keep the heroine roped into the bad bargain as an added bonus. Nurse Kim Sargent works for Dr. Bill Holland, who is a brilliant, single-minded loner of uncertain age, but nearing his fifties—practically dead! Speaking of dead, so are Kim’s hopes for marriage because, at 26, she is approaching the cliff of spinsterhood with no hope of escape: She’s supporting the household with her job at Dr. Holland’s office, just three blocks from her house, from which she can regularly look in on her father, wheelchair-bound these several years after the car crash that killed Mrs. Sargent and every mote of joy in the house. It’s not clear why she feels she has “dismal chances for romance and marriage in the dull, provincial town” of 11,000, except that she seems convinced that she should either be at work or at home caring for her father. But here is the dubious scenario, and when Dr. Holland proposes on page 17, he points out that he can finance her father’s care and her sister’s education, and that “as Mrs. Holland, she would enjoy an undreamed-of security, an enviable position in the community.” So she agrees.

Immediately it becomes obvious even to Kim that this is a bad idea, and she realizes, “she loved Bill Holland … like a father.” Her biological father and sister go ballistic, but she will not be dissuaded: “I’ve already committed myself,” she says, because no one is ever allowed to change their minds. To prove the point that it’s a bad match, the happiest of men immediately commences to building an enormous house and excludes Kim from all planning and meetings with the architect. If that isn’t sign enough, Bill flings himself into work even more furiously than before, which means they never go out and he doesn’t bother to come around to the Sargent house to meet her family. But she gets used to “her strangely placid, semiformal engagement to marry Bill Holland. It would be a pleasant life, she decided. It would be devoid of excitement or momentous challenges, and perhaps it would lack (as it did now) the thrills young lovers encountered.” Sounds swell!

Whom Kim does encounter is Dr. Reid Coleman—“just a kid” at 27, says Dr. Holland, tactlessly forgetting that Kim is younger than that. Reid has signed up to be Bill’s partner at the clinic, and 11 pages after meeting the hot and hunky doctor, Kim realizes that “Reid Coleman brought out in her all the symptoms Pop had ascribed to love.” Virtually nothing except casual conversation precedes this announcement, so it’s a bit bewildering, though not for one second surprising; we wise VNRN readers knew poor Mr. Bill was doomed from the minute he proposed. To her credit, Kim decides she’s going to tell Bill the truth, but guess what??? Before she has a chance to drop her bomb, Bill suffers a debilitating stroke and is paralyzed and unable to speak. “If Bill survived, she would never let him know how close she had come to breaking his heart,” she decides. “Committed to a loyalty deeper than love, she would be waiting for him when and if he recovered.” We’ll see about that!

Now working with Reid every day, she quickly realizes that “this was the kind of love you experience only once in your lifetime, and when it goes unreciprocated and unrealized, you never find it again.” We’re barely halfway through the book, so we have to endure countless visits with speechless Bill, nasty but entirely true rumors in town about Reid and Kim, longing glances from Reid, and numerous tears from Kim. Eventually a widowed nurse a lot closer to Bill’s age is hired to help with Bill’s speech therapy, and exactly no one will be surprised that when Kim eventually works up the guts to tell Bill she is in love with Reid, he beats her to the punch and stutters that he’s in love with the sweet, unassuming Wilma Ellison. At book’s close, Reid and Kim go parking and decide that “older people, like Bill and Pop, like you to believe they know what’s best for you,” and that “usually they do.” Given that the entire premise of this book was about how to escape Bill’s grossly inaccurate belief that he knew what was best for Kim, it just leaves you scratching your head.

This bland, uninteresting book has little to offer in the way of interesting characters outside of the trashy, loudmouthed office secretary. The plot is trite and ridiculously predictable. The writing is not overtly bad but certainly not anything special, either. In short, if perfectly serviceable, it’s not really worth the effort.

Overseas Nurse

By Jennifer Ames
(pseud. Maysie Greig), ©1951
Cover illustration by ?Lou Marchetti

At the Sydney airport, Nurse June Ray made her first error: she mistook a handsome stranger for her sponsor, Dr. Jed Lawson. Unaware of her mistake, June spent a romantic day and a half swimming in the dazzling sunlight and dancing under the stars. By the time she met the man with whom she had been corresponding and to whom she owed her last chance at a nursing career, her heart was no longer her own …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTE:
“Being young and pretty takes up a girl’s time – too much time.”

REVIEW:
I suppose that we shouldn’t be too surprised that, as the book opens, Nurse June Ray is fleeing the country, heading for Australia. What I did find unusual is her reason for leaving: She fell asleep on night duty and her elderly patient died. The doctor on the case drummed her out of the hospital, saying, “Negligence is a mild way to express it, Nurse. I believe had you not gone to sleep your patient would be alive at this moment.” Ouch.

When she arrives in Sydney, she’s met by a hunky fella who drives a hot sports car. She keeps looking at his “strong and capable” shoulders. But soon she finds out he’s not Dr. Jed Lawson, the kindly doctor who befriended her brother Clive, cared for him in his final hours after a mysterious car crash, and invited her to Australia. He’s Ken Wyman, manager of the Gumbula sheep ranch, where Clive was working. The ranch is now owned by Shelah Wyman, the slinky widow of Ken’s older brother, Roy. Roy was a “semi-invalid,” wounded during the war, and an impeccable driver who nonetheless crashed his car for no apparent reason, killing himself and Clive and leaving the ranch to his not-so-grieving widow. Shelah keeps talking about selling the ranch, mostly to piss off Ken, but also because living out in the bush is too lonely for her. She’d be all right, she says, if only she were married again. “Roy was scarcely a husband to me for some time before he died,” she says, and is she looking at Ken’s strong and capable shoulders when she speaks?

The day Nurse June arrives at Dr. Lawson’s house, Ken’s grandmother, Mrs. Kensey, has another stroke and requires round-the-clock nursing care. So June is packed off to the ranch, where she and Ken can kiss behind closed doors from time to time while she cares for Mrs. Kensey. When she does have a bit of time off, June helps out Dr. Lawson, who soon makes a play for her, telling her how lonely he is and how he’d like to settle down. Um, gosh, how about those Red Sox?

Back at the ranch, June’s patient is always mumbling about another will that Roy made before his death. She tells June that Shelah creeps around the house at night looking for the will, and she is always trying to get out of bed to find it before Shelah does. She also refuses to drink any beverage that Shelah prepares, because “that’s how she murdered him.” Naturally, everyone assumes the stroke has made her dotty. Well, she is a bit dotty, calling June Claire, because June looks like Mrs. Kensey’s deceased daughter, Ken’s mother. To prove the point, Ken drags her into his room to show June a portrait of his dead mums, and then, in a scene that would keep Freud busy for weeks, kisses her repeatedly, stopping only to say, “You are so like she was.”

One night, in an uncharacteristic gesture of friendliness, Shelah brings June a cup of coffee to help her stay awake all night, along with a nice glass of hot milk for Mrs. Wyman. As June struggles to stay awake—curiously, the coffee seems to have made her more sleepy, not less—she remembers the last time she felt like this, the night her elderly patient died, when the patient’s crabby niece had brought her a cup of tea … June had felt so sorry for the gaunt thing, who had just overheard her aunt tell June she was going to change her will and leave her fortune to June …

The next morning, you may not be surprised to learn, Mrs. Wyman is found dead while June is sawing logs in her chair. Everyone is a pretty good sport about June’s role in the death, saying she’d been overworked and had been up for days with Mrs. Wyman, so they’re all willing to let this go. But at the inquest, June pipes up that she feels she was drugged, and mentions that it was Shelah who brought her the coffee. And then there are the cups they had drunk from, which have vanished, and no one seems to have taken them. Shelah responds by pulling out a letter that June had written to her brother, explaining in great detail what had happened with her first dead patient, and says that June is just trying to find excuses for her bad nursing. There’s no proof, so nothing comes of June’s allegations except that she feels compelled to leave the ranch on the next train for Sydney. And the train actually pulls out of the station with June on it, with no farewell whatsoever from Ken, and never mind that speeding sports car that passes the train just before it reaches the next station.

The ending of this book could be foretold by a ten-year-old, including the hiding place of the new will. But even so, it’s not a complete waste of time. It’s not campy or amusing at all, but the writing is decent enough, and some of the characters are fun to watch, most notably Shelah and Mrs. Wyman. It reads more like a modern-day romance story, with the couple in question kissing in one chapter and quarreling in the next, and a big misunderstanding keeping them apart until the very end. Well, not the very end, as the couple is actually married five pages from the last page, and spends a very satisfying (wink, wink) month-long honeymoon in Fiji, another rarity for a VNRN. The “mystery” aspect of it, though not very suspenseful, gives you something else to think about, and overall this is a fairly decent book.