Nurse Incognito

By Fay Chandos

(pseud. Irene Mossop Swatridge), ©1964 

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

When a love affair between a nurse and a doctor goes wrong, the unhappiness of the situation is naturally increased if they have to go on working in the same hospital. That was why Caroline was glad to get away from St. Keverne’s … and Brandon … to a temporary job in the lovely Bahamas. It was disconcerting, though, for her to find herself in the middle of a family feud. Her first loyalty was to the old lady who employed her, but she couldn’t help liking and trusting Roland Dayler and sympathizing with his refusal to give up his children; couldn’t help, either, liking (though she didn’t trust) that “wicked” younger brother whose bad reputation was enough to make any woman look twice at him.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Men are children at heart. Given the opportunity, they all grab at the fairy on the Christmas tree. It’s a wise woman’s job to lead her man firmly in the other direction, not to let him stand under the tree, gawking up at the glitter.” 

“Sparks aren’t a fire, but they can start one.”

“At my age, one rarely cares for advice, however sound.”

“Wouldn’t you like to try your hand at civilizing me?”

“‘Tis better to have loved and lost’ than to be obliged to realize that one has been played for a sucker.”

REVIEW:
Poor Nurse Caroline Whytham has pinned all her hopes on Dr. Brandon Hessare, who has been taking her out for years, and now that she is about to graduate from nursing school, they are going to announce their engagement! Unfortunately, “if she had to look out for herself, she always would be among those stranded at the bus stop. She lacked the assurance and initiative to fight her way on board.” So she misses the first car to the graduation party, which is held at the family mansion of her best friend, Clover Pontock-Pikey, and when she does arrive—could she have been more than 30 minutes behind Clover?—she discovers that Brandon and Clover have, in that narrow window, fallen in love and become engaged. 

The silver lining to her sudden freedom is that Clover’s grandmother decides to take her to the Bahamas with her, ostensibly to serve as her nurse—the battle axe has a heart condition—but also to help Mrs. P-P wrest her great-grandchildren, six-year-old twins Viola and Sebastian, away from their father, Roland Dayler, who owns a large estate. It’s kind of staggering that we’re asked to believe that the claims of a great-grandmother outweigh those of a father, even if he must be a man, but here we are, and we must make the best of it. Roland had been married to Mrs. P-P’s granddaughter Pearl, a beautiful but shallow flirt who had lost interest in her husband almost immediately after marrying him, but who had died in a water-skiing accident—while pregnant, no less, losing the baby as well. An odd detail we’re not quite sure what to do with, but there it is. Clearly the couple weren’t as estranged as all that.

Upon their arrival, sinister things begin to happen! The electricity in both Caroline and Mrs. P-P’s rooms fails, and the candles that are always stocked in the bedrooms vanish! Worse than that, someone lets a kitten loose in Mrs. P-P’s bedroom! Attention turns to the children’s nanny, Annette: “She wants to drive me away from this house. Anyone can see that,” Mrs. P-P concludes after her narrow escape from death. Though there are other possible suspects, including Roland’s brother Ruy (how do you pronounce that?), who with Annette is “allied against me,” Caroline concludes, not wanting to miss getting in on the paranoia.

Further nefarious adventures ensue: Mrs. P-P is drugged into a stupor by the children, who are obeying the orders of a mockingbird outside their window, who sounds like Annette. Caroline falls hard and fast for Roland: At their first meeting, “she was seized by an extraordinary sense of exultation—as though this was the moment she had been waiting for, half her life.” The rub is that she very much resembles Pearl—which is just creepy, though it’s not the first time we’ve encountered this trope. And Ruy, who has been in love with Annette for seven years, she herself chasing Roland, decides to complete the circle by kissing Caroline, who astonishingly decides to go for it without giving a single thought to Roland. “She couldn’t go on mourning over Brandon. That was futile and humiliating. If Ruy was trying to flirt with her, why not let him?” Because, um, Roland?

Here the book becomes part Gothic novel, part mystery, and almost not a nurse novel—as despite the fact that Mrs. P-P seems to be sinking further into a coma, Caroline cannot reveal she’s a nurse, and so leaves Ruy’s secretary Jessamy to babysit the apparently dying woman, and even when the two children also ingest the same poison and the remaining conscious adults “work on” the children all night to bring them around—Caroline, curiously, taking the less dangerously ill child—her occupation remains a secret until the last page.

It’s an odd book, with machinations and suspicions abounding, and the poisoning/attempted murder of four different people, the guilty party still roaming free on the last page, and no discussion of their being taken into custody. Author Irene Swatridge continues her affinity for alliterative names, but also unfortunately displays a tendency toward paragraphs made up entirely of questions: “Had Pearl found him a domestic tyrant? Was that why she had preferred the amenities and social life of Nassau to her home here? Or had she been bored by Roland’s pre-occupation with the estate and its crops? Had she been weighed down by him? Take away his good looks and his old-world courtesy, and what was left? Mightn’t he be singularly heavy and humorless as a husband?” Also I do wish Caroline were less of a wimp. “Roland seeks subconsciously for a gentle, loving wife who will be his complement, and content to be ruled by him. You are such a one, I think,” she is told—and even worse, she answers, “Thank you.” Not surprisingly, her nursing career seems likely as over as the book is on the last page. Still, this book is curiously compelling, as Swatridge’s books have proved to be so far (see Nurse Willow’s Ward and Jubilee Hospital). Also, there are beautiful ball gowns! And a fabulous, snidely witty grande dame in Mrs. P-P! So if it’s not Swatridge’s best, she’s still not done badly by us, her readers, at all. 

A Nurse’s Quest

By Ruth McCarthy Sears, ©1971

Cover illustration by Edrien King

While vacationing in the historic California town of Monterey, Darcy Burnett accidentally ran into her old college roommate, Evie Wood, and Evie's handsome newspaperman brother, Paul. Raven-haired Darcy, just out of nursing school, was a little awed by the Woods, with their fabulous country mansion and immense fortune. But when Darcy was suddenly called to Wood Manor on private duty, she found that her dream palace was a nest of intrigue and danger. All too quickly she became entangled in a web of deception and evil. Could she trust attractive Amos Chandler, another young newsman? Or should she turn to Paul, sometimes distant, sometimes too tantalizingly close for comfort?

GRADE: B-

REVIEW:

Darcy Burnett is a lonely orphan, window shopping in Monterey while on vacation, having just graduated from nursing school. Suddenly across the street she sees her college roommate Evie Woods and her hunky brother Paul! Evie and Paul are the very wealthy grandchildren of a matriarchal family on the Bay Area peninsula, and though Darcy has met and lusted after Paul before, he’d never given her the time of day—but now “Paul Wood had looked at her, had actually seen her this afternoon and now—now anything could happen!” Indeed it can: Paul asks Darcy to dinner, during which the engagement appears imminent. But when he is dropping her off at her apartment, a former patient is waiting drunk on the sidewalk outside her apartment with a bag of raw steaks in hand for her to cook up for him, and now it’s over between her and Paul! “Oh, he must think her an adventuress or worse! To find a drunken man on her doorstep with food for a tête-à-tête, and an empty bottle of gin!” Indeed, Paul proves to be just that shallow and barely speaks to her again for the rest of the book.

But then she gets a panicked call from Evie—Gran is dying! Curiously Darcy takes this as an invitation to give up her apartment and move in to the family manor, for her first actual job. Upon arrival she finds Gran collapsed on the bed—and Darcy, clever girl, diagnoses chronic arsenic poisoning based on a rash on Gran’s wrists! When mean cousin Natalie, who has managed to ban Evie from Gran’s room for the past few weeks, barges in, she is “clearly surprised to see a white-clad nurse composedly reading beside the lamp”!

We learn that there have been two other apparent attempts on Gran’s life—a random bullet fired into her bedroom and a fire in the room below Gran’s bedroom—but when Gran mentions that someone is trying to kill her, Darcy protests, “Please don’t say that, or think it.” And call the police? Much less a doctor? Why would we do that? Cousin Natalie and her masher husband Algy are the prime suspects, but then Darcy hears a man speaking a foreign language on her balcony, and when she goes out to investigate, a tile crashes off the roof, coming inches from killing her! Then Natalie throws a huge party for her teenaged girls and the hippies from the inconvenient commune next door show up and get the guests high on marijuana, which somehow renders them all unconscious. While this is going on, Petey, the toddler son of Gran’s widowed daughter Letitia, goes missing. He turns up with the sheriff, who has finally been called, along with the man who has abducted Petey—who happens to be Letitia’s allegedly dead husband! He’s been living with the hippies for the past four years at the commune, very slowly and ineffectually plotting Gran’s murder so that he can gain control of Letitia and Petey’s inheritance, but it’s not clear why he felt kidnapping Petey would further that aim. It’s also not clear why he waited four years to enact his nefarious plan. Letitia responds to her revived husband by melting away into a coma, emerging a week later in a greatly diminished mental capacity,  but seems to live happily ever after as a perennial four-year-old. Paul, after weeks of completely ignoring Darcy, comes to her with open arms and proposes. On the basis of one date and weeks of rudeness, she accepts, naturally.

It’s a pleasant enough book, if mildly bizarre in its plotting, but fairly perfunctory, as is the writing—no Best Quotes for you with this one. The mysterious failing murderer was not difficult to identify, and I’m not exactly what the title quest is that the nurse is supposed to be on, unless it’s after a husband, and I’m not sure Darcy did too well in that quarter. But the dated atmosphere and the characters are somewhat interesting, and you could certainly do worse than A Nurse’s Quest.

Doctor’s Nurse

By Dorothy Worley, ©1961

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Attractive Patricia Lloyd, R.N., had two problems—both of them doctors. Dr. Jeffrey Wayne was handsome, mature and mysteriously drawn to Patricia, beyond the call of duty. Dr. Bill Gregory was young, very much in love and intensely jealous. Caught between the two, Patricia found her personal emotions—and professional duty—in sudden and grave danger.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“I wish you’d worn something besides pedal pushers today. I have guests coming for dinner.”

“There are other things in life besides marriage.”
“Not for a woman there isn’t.”

“You’re spoiled. You should have been spanked every day of your life.”

REVIEW:
Rich girls have all the luck. They’re beautiful, everyone is in love with them, and they get to do whatever they want with your life. Even be a nurse. Of course, their beautiful society mothers are always going to be nagging them to give it up and get married, but they just move out into their own apartments. Some handsome doctor is always trailing around after them, begging them to get married, but they tell him no, kiss him a little, and send him home. Such is the life of Patricia Lloyd. She’s not ready to settle down, but Dr. Bill Gregory, who has loved her since she was in elementary school, will hang around until she is.

And then Dr. Jeff Wayne, age 48, the new chief of staff, moves to town and picks Patricia above all the other nurses – though she never even applied for the job – as his nurse. Pat’s longtime friend Donna, who has had nothing her entire life – her father left her mother for another woman, she had to hold a job all through high school to support her family, her mother committed suicide, and every man she’s ever loved has loved Pat instead – finally snaps and begins spreading vicious gossip about Pat and Dr. Wayne all over town. Dr. Wayne does show a lot of interest in Pat, inviting her to stay at his house to befriend his five-year-old daughter, Barbara, who has an undiagnosed medical problem that leaves her listless, exhausted, and unable to walk some days, and perfectly healthy on others.

The fiercely overprotective governess, Mrs. MacDugal, gives Barbara medicine that makes her sleep all afternoon, which everyone in the house is aware of except her father. Pat smells paregoric, a narcotic medication, on Barbara’s breath, and Pat’s dog, which Pat frequently brings to visit Barbara, is poisoned. Has Mrs. MacDugal mentioned that she despises dogs? Oh, yes, numerous times. The truth of what is going on here is no surprise, certainly not to the astute reader, who can figure this out by page 40. The real mystery is why no one, most of all the trained nurse, ever speaks to Barbara’s father about their concerns.

Another “mystery” of the book is why Pat does not at all resemble her father, Tom. A letter to Pat’s mother, Ilone, found by Pat’s father and shown to Pat, is mentioned early but never explained. Ilone says her first marriage was for love, but Pat knows that Ilone never really loved Tom Lloyd. Then we have the unexplained attentions of Dr. Wayne, a man old enough to be Pat’s father ...

The book concludes with a double crisis: number one, when Pat finally tells her suspicions of Mrs. MacDugal to Dr. Wayne, including the fact that sometimes Barbara smells of whisky (news to the reader), and he decides to fire the governess, and number two, when Donna, who has been “heading for a crackup,” finally decides to do herself in. Both these calamities has been bearing down on the reader like slow-moving dump truck for most of the book, yet they somehow manage to zoom past in mere paragraphs, offering absolutely no excitement, surprise, or satisfaction. The book is not badly written, but it has no spark and not a shred of humor or camp. You can do a lot worse than Doctor’s Nurse, but you can certainly do a bit better.

Nurse's Masquerade

By Jean Carew (pseud. Jane Corby), ©1964

Never in her nursing career had lovely Cara Merrill received so strange a request. But Brent Butler was so persuasive that she reluctantly agreed to accompany him to the fabulous Butler estate and pretend to be his debutante fiancée. Cara’s real purpose, Brent told her, was to watch over his elderly uncle whose health had been mysteriously failing. Brent was suspicious of his handsome cousin Paul—and when both men declared their love for her, Cara had to make the most important decision of her life!

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTE:
“When you’re in love, the eyes do get shinier.”

“Seaking of fireworks, you should have seen the display Dad put on when he heard I’d ordered a topless bathing suit!”

“If two people are in love, there’s no use to discuss the pros and cons of the future like a Philadelphia lawyer.”

REVIEW:
Cara Merrill is bored with working as a nurse at a New York City hospital. She’s only 22, and presumably has only been there for a year or two—she’d better get married quick so she can give up her job permanently and become a housewife. In the meantime, however, she’s saved up some money so she can sleep late, go window shopping on Fifth Avenue, and take drives into the country. But the money is running out, and she needs a new job. So she sends a “rather flippant note” in response to an ad in the paper seeking a nurse who is “experienced, blonde, willing to live in the country (large estate).” Why she needs to be blonde is never addressed, but her facetious response surprisingly wins her an interview. Even more surprisingly, though she opens the interview with Brent Butler by scolding him about his unusual ad, he offers her the job. The position entails pretending to be his fiancée and going to stay for a month at Soundings, his Uncle Josh’s Long Island estate, to find out if Josh is being poisoned. Josh hates doctors, so Brent can’t just take Josh to see one, and instead has concocted this scheme to get him medical observation on the sly.

Cara agrees to the plan, and before you know it, she is en route to the estate in a shiny new beige convertible with a huge sapphire on her hand, both courtesy of her faux beau. Cara is to pretend she is a debutante, which means only gussying up her language. “ ‘It’s a …’ Cara began, and stopped. She had been going to say ‘good,’ but remembered her debutante status and changed it for the livelier, ‘a keen custom, I think.’ ” Naturally, everyone in the house is totally fooled, even if she has never played golf or tennis, can’t sail very well, has never left New York, knows way too much about concussions, and wears dungarees and a green and white plaid nylon frock, the very idea of which send shivers down my spine.

Soundings is a large unkempt mansion with “a vaguely sinister air about it,” which seems to stem largely from its color: “Who ever heard of painting a mansion brown?” Uncle Josh has been bound to a wheelchair for years from polio, but is otherwise in good health—except for these attacks in which he feels “squeamish” and appears sallow and drawn, which always seem to come on after dinner. The suspects include Josh’s sister Susan and her nine-year-old daughter Linda, who have just returned to the States from their plantation in Haiti. Brent’s cousin Paul, a “perennial college boy type,” flirts madly with Cara, making Brent look at her with squinty eyes. Diane Forbes, an old pal of Brent’s, is hanging around the house, apparently determined to win Brent for herself, which makes Cara green with envy. There’s a lot of talk about how neither one of them means a whit to the other, but we know differently, don’t we, readers?

When Paul takes Cara sailing one afternoon and they are late returning home, Cara and Brent have a fight on the terrace, and she gives him back the ring and drives back to her Greenwich Village apartment—only to hitch a ride with Brent back again four days later because Josh had asked her to come to the July 4th festivities. Once there, Cara is growing increasingly concerned because Linda has created a voodoo doll of Diane. “Cara stood as if turned to stone. This was no childish whim!” For someone who doesn’t believe in black magic, she sure gets worked up about it. If it were me, I’d be more concerned about how Linda keeps going on about murdering Diane: “I’m going to kill Diane. I hate her!” Instead, Cara dishes out a treacly lecture: “If we want to hurt another person, and if we have evil thoughts about them, we really hurt only ourselves.” But she should be biting her tongue. Linda tosses her Diane doll into the pool, and a few hours later the phone rings—Diane has driven off a bridge into the river! She’s not dead yet, but maybe we can fish that doll out and try stabbing it with Linda’s “machete,” a silver letter opener!

For Linda’s next act, she concocts a potion out of ground beetles, soy sauce, and rum to feed to Uncle Josh to make him well again. The other adults are banished from the library while Linda, wearing a red scarf around her head and a pillow case as a dress, holds a private ceremony with Josh. Cara feels the sense of menace of the estate stronger than ever, and is shivering on the terrace and tearing her handkerchief to shreds while Paul chain smokes, Brent paces, and Susan clasps her hands tightly in her lap. Even the butler is poised at the door, ready to dash inside. What exactly are they afraid of? And if everyone there thinks this is such a terrible idea, why are they allowing the child to go through with it?

Linda’s voodoo works again, but not as she had planned—Uncle Josh drops with a massive heart attack. Cara springs into action, immediately asking the butler to put Josh to bed—apparently the nearby hospital isn’t a suitable option—and donning the uniform and cap she has brought with her. Josh is saved, and the butler gratuitously reveals that Josh’s “well-publicized attitude toward the medical profession was mainly a pose.” Why he would pretend such a thing? The poisoning angle is never mentioned again, and Cara is engaged just pages later, at the Fourth of July fireworks.

It’s a quick read, and not terribly painful, though the loose ends do flap annoyingly. I was somewhat perplexed by all the bizarre relationships that end by passing unremarked. Is jealousy supposed to be the same as love? Is Susan, who has dismissed Cara’s concerns about Linda, to blame for her daughter’s transformation into a (somewhat successful) witch doctor? And what about the voodoo—is it just coincidence, or is it supposed to be real? I’m left with more questions than satisfactory answers on the last page of this book. Really, the best thing about it is the cover—but even this, when we are all but beaten over the head with our heroine’s blonde tresses (they match her car!), leaves you wondering.

Once a Nurse ... But Always a Woman

By Willo Davis Roberts, ©1966

San Francisco was to be a bridge to a new life for Noel Emery, R.N., when the pretty nurse put a tragic past behind her. As the jet carrying Noel circled San Francisco, her eyes met the blue gaze of a handsome stranger ... a mysterious man she would come to know only as Collie, even though he would call her by the pet name of “Christmas” and open her heart. When the elusively romantic Collie disappeared, Noel tried to ease her heartache by turning to a glamorous fashion career—a career that kept her involved in a dangerous game between ruthless people. But a curious twist of fate was to lead her again back to Collie—and to nursing.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTE:
“Are you one of those confounded women who are always right?”

REVIEW:
There’s nothing like being in a near-miss airplane disaster to bond two total strangers. Noel Emery is a 26-year-old nurse in a jet circling San Francisco when the co-pilot actually enters the cabin to tell the passengers that there’s a problem with the landing gear, and they have enough fuel to keep circling for another hour. What happens after that, if they can’t fix the problem, he won’t say. A woman faints, and she and the big man with wide shoulders across the aisle from her dash out of their seats to revive her. Somehow—did they just fiddle all the switches in the cockpit until something worked?—the landing gear fixes itself and they land safely, once everyone has put out their cigarettes.

Collie—that is the only name he gives her—then helps her find a hotel and takes her all over San Francisco, to Fisherman’s Wharf, the Top of the Mark, the hungry i (once a storied nightclub, but when I lived in San Francisco, it was a seedy topless joint). He takes her to his house on Marina Boulevard, but when he vanishes from her life, she can never find it again—all those stucco houses with iron grillwork all look the same.

She, like many a VNRN heroine, is on the run from her past life, in which she fell in love with a patient with end-stage renal disease who, despite a kidney transplant, succumbs to the disease. (For more about kidney disease and transplants, see Nurse in Acapulco, a definitive source on the subject.) She’s giving up her nursing career and takes a job working for Katherine Rossi, an up-and-coming fashion designer, who is by turns overly generous and ruthlessly slapping the help around. Katherine needs money to stage a fashion show in New York (her money is all tied up in a show in Los Angeles), so she drags Noel with her back to the family hacienda in the valley to demand more money from her brother, to whom her dead husband willed his millions instead of her. Well, just take one guess who her brother turns out to be!

It also won’t take you long to figure out what Collie does for a living—he’s running the Rossi Hospital and pioneering new treatments for burn patients, and we get a tour of that facility and a rather unflinching introduction to its patients, adults and children alike, who are recovering (or not) from severe accidents. There’s an accident with an autoclave at the hospital one weekend, when all the staff nurses are out of town, so Noel is pressed into service, and into closer interaction with Collie.

Back at the ranch (really), Katherine is attempting to coerce Collie to cough up the cash by threatening to take her 12-year-old daughter, Martha, away from Collie, who has raised her from the age of three. Collie is standing firm—and then some very suspicious accidents begin to happen. Katherine’s car drives into a tree with the housekeeper behind the wheel, and then a carafe of cocoa on Katherine’s nightstand turns out to have been poisoned with arsenic after another assistant of hers becomes ill after tasting it. “In another hour or so I’d have drunk the rest of it myself. Do you think there was something in the cocoa?” Katherine innocently asks her brother. The question of who is behind these stunts is debated, but mercifully not for long, as it’s pretty clear who’s behind it all.

This book is a good read, with enjoyable locations and picturesque descriptions of everything from Katherine’s elegant fashions to the ranch house to San Francisco itself. Furthermore, it is rare that we see such a realistic picture of what nursing can be. Burns are a particularly horrifying injury, in the amount of pain they cause and their appearance, even after they have healed. That Once a Nurse shows them to us—from weeping open wounds to the black scabs (eschars) that form to the sloughing tissue to the mesh pattern of healing skin grafts—is both surprising and admirable. So this book earns my respect on several fronts. Though there’s not much more to it than decent writing and a realistic look at a difficult subject, it’s easily worth a few hours of your day.

Nurse on Trial

By Jane Converse
(pseud. of Adele Kay Maritano), ©1966

Jennifer Mellin, R.N., is on trial—before the world, before her own conscience. For she was the last person to see her mother, ex-movie star Angela Di Marco, alive. Exhausted by caring for her hypochondriac mother, her professional senses numbed by a never-ceasing tirade of hysterical demands, had Jennie in fact given Angela the wrong pills from the vast array of bottles in the medicine cabinet? Was Angela’s death—as her wardrobe mistress, Bessie Wykoff, hinted maliciously—the result of foul play?

GRADE: B-

REVIEW:
I was looking forward to my next Jane Converse title after the fabulous Surf Safari Nurse, but Nurse on Trial was a bit of a letdown. It’s not bad, but it doesn’t have the humor or even the fine writing of its sister. They were both written the same year, so maybe Jane shot the wad on the Safari and coasted through the Trial.

Jennifer Mellin is the daughter of a famous faded movie star, Angela Di Marco, who is a Garbo and a Joan Crawford all rolled into one glorious mess. Jennifer is obliged to leave the side of her doctor fiancé to nurse her mother, whom she hasn’t seen in years, because she is told that Mommie Dearest is on her deathbed. The scenario is compelling: “Unaccountably breathless Jennifer started toward the bed. It was a monstrously large round affair, mounted on a circular dais, and surrounded by sheer white curtains that were affixed to a curved track in the ceiling. The curtains were drawn back now to reveal Angela propped up against at least a dozen pillows and covered by a custom-made gold-threaded quilt of white satin. Two Siamese cats dozed at the foot of the bed. She wore a black marabou bed jacket over a low-cut nightgown of powder blue lace … The red-gold hair was brushed into a high Grecian halo on top of her head, an arrangement that brought her pale, drawn features into startling focus.”

After this introduction, we go round and round on the Hollywood starlet carousel: green pills, pink pills, smeared mascara, scrapbooks and clippings at 3:30 a.m., cigarettes, broken mirrors, black velvet negligees, bourbon and peppermints. The usual manipulations: “I wanted to spare you, Jennie. Sometimes I’m in such terrible pain, I don’t know what I’m doing.” “Let me die in peace!” “You haven’t noticed that I’m wearing the Dior. Careful, Jennie! You’ll muss me up!” “Lies, lies, lies! Is this why you came here? To slander me?” “Get me something for my nerves …”

For 76 pages the story staggers drunkenly along on its spike-heeled gold kid mules. We know that Angela is doomed—the back cover tells us so—but it isn’t until page 112 that she actually kicks off. There is no jury trial at all, as Angela’s doctor decides she died of cirrhosis. (Curiously, she has left-sided pain—the liver is on the right—and no jaundice, but then, Angela’s not much of a nurse: As much as she despises her mother’s self-medication, she always caves and gives her more pills.) Perhaps her trial is more metaphoric than legal, but she doesn’t acquit herself very admirably, inexplicably helpless to save herself from the manipulation or her mother from disease, organic or addictive.

The burning question, as condensed on the back cover, is whether Jennie poisoned her mother: “I don’t remember what I gave my mother last night. … Maybe I killed her!” But with just 16 pages between Angela’s death and the end of the book, we are not left to wonder for very long. The premise of the book is good, if a little hackneyed, but after it sets up, it doesn’t know what to do with itself. It can barely be called a romance, as Jennie is happily engaged from the opening chapter, and there is never any tension about that relationship. I’ve read books that are a lot worse, but I also know that Jane can do a lot better.