The Nurse and the Crystal Ball

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1969

When Sue Whittier unpacked her suitcase, 3000 miles away from the nurses’ dormitory in Maryland, she found a fortune-teller’s crystal ball under her nylons. It was a friend’s idea of a joke, but Sue—who didn’t believe in such things—wished it could tell her what she was letting herself in for. She had driven to California to be with Dave Harding, the man she had walked out on seven years ago just before their wedding—a dying man now who had written, begging her to come. And she had … Even though seeing David would mean seeing his half-brother, Marv, too—the secret reason Sue had broken the engagement. Still, she was prepared for that. What she wasn’t prepared for was finding another old love of Dave’s at his bedside: Gloria, the blonde he had married on the rebound, the wife who had deserted him two months later and has now returned—with a son she claimed was his. But was it true …? Sue didn’t need a crystal ball to tell her that here was a woman who could not be trusted …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I am going upstairs to Mr. Harding. If you try to stop me—well, like most nurses, I know a few judo tricks.” 

“In my young years I was never a juvenile delinquent. But it’s never too late to start, even at my ripe old age. So how about us having a little snort?”

“Love and money! She sighed to happily and kept smiling to herself. What more could woman ask for?”

“Just to prove that she was a woman of patience and strong will, Gloria did not box his ears as she longed passionately to do.”

REVIEW:
When you find a book with a title like this, you can’t help but get your hopes up. So much potential for rollicking, campy fun! Florence Stonebraker can certainly deliver the goods, too, but it must be confessed that the quality of her work is erratic. So my optimism was guarded. And this turned out to be warranted. 

Sue Whittier has left her job and driven 3,000 miles to La Jolla because the man she dumped seven years ago has leukemia and is at death’s door. He had written to her, begging her to come care for him in his final weeks, so sure! But things are little complicated. First of all, there is a crystal ball in her suitcase under a stack of nylons. Remember nylons? I hope you don’t. Secondly, the first person she runs into is Dave’s half-brother Marv, who is actually the reason why Sue left Dave—right before her wedding “she went down to the beach with another man. And that other man took her in his arms. And her dream of forever and ever love with Dave was forever blasted.” Upon her return, she and Marv immediately get into a rather strange argument in which Marv tells Sue to leave but will not tell her why, and then finally, as she is stomping off, he tells her, “I have never stopped loving you.”

Next she meets the surprise guest, Dave’s wife Gloria. He had picked her up on the rebound during a wild few months “with a crowd who spent their time drinking, smoking marijuana, driving to Vegas to gamble over weekends, swimming in the nude,” but Gloria didn’t last very long either. Now, learning somehow that Dave is about to kick off and has a large fortune to dispose of, Gloria is back at the family mansion and has somehow installed herself as supreme ruler over Dave’s mother and Dave himself. The trick is that she has a six-year-old boy in tow named Bobby, who she claims is Dave’s son. Gloria and Bobby are quite the pair—Gloria is a vicious, scheming vixen out to sabotage Sue, while Bobby is an angry, uncontrollable wrecking ball. “It is not as if he were retarded or anything like that, sweetie,” Gloria explains. “Actually, Bobby is unusually bright for his age. His only problem is that he is inclined to be a psychopathic liar, and that needn’t bother you.” OK! But everyone else in the house is kind to Bobby, who transforms under their supervision into a friendly, gentle boy. Sue even gives him the crystal ball, and he starts talking about seeing his dead parents in it. Um, what?

Meanwhile, Gloria has hired a doctor to care for Dave, but Sue suspects the man is a quack. He is prescribing no end of medications for Dave, and has even given a prescription to Dave’s mother Martha, who had seemed fairly healthy until she had started taking the pills as ordered, but woke up feeling dizzy, strange, unable to speak clearly or even walk without falling. Sue advises Martha to “hold the prescription pills under her tongue until Gloria left the room.” Why she cannot just refuse to take the medication outright is unclear, but once Martha starts dumping the meds in the toilet she is feeling spry and energetic again. Dave keeps taking his medication, and is getting worse and worse.

Marv, meanwhile, is trying to kiss Sue, usually after a loud argument in which he grabs her arms painfully, but she is fighting him off and running, at least for now. He keeps exerting everyone in the house to “play it cool” with Gloria, but is not sharing his long-term plan with anyone, so soon naturally decides without any evidence whatsoever that Marv is in cahoots with Gloria, plotting to inherit Dave’s money.

Suddenly Dave decides he is going to make a new will and locks himself up with Marv, who happens to be a lawyer, to create the thing. Exactly two nights later Dave “simply fell asleep, after taking the pills which Gloria made a nightly rite of putting into the tiny plastic box—and he did not wake up.” The rest of the book plays out pretty much as you know it will, including one character going stark, raving mad—a Florence Stonebraker specialty.

There are a lot of irritating aspects to this book. One is the constant suggestion that there are deep secrets at work here: For example, on her first day, Marv inexplicably tells Sue “I don’t feel free to tell you” why he wants her to leave immediately, though the reason is obvious the minute she walks through the mansion door. Marv, brooding in his room after an argument with Sue, “could not figure in exactly what way this money-greedy woman could hurt Susan,” when the obvious answer is that she can’t. When Bobby starts seeing his parents in the crystal ball, Martha declares, “there’s more to his story than meets the eye. We haven’t enough sense to understand what it is.” Yet the most egregious mystery—did Gloria kill Dave?—is left completely unanswered. Is it fair play for an author to throw out a bone that huge and then walk away from it? I spent some time thinking this question over and concluded that the answer is usually no, though I might accept it from an author so gifted that it actually worked (see A Series of Unfortnate Events by Lemony Snicket). So in this case, no. Even the eponymous crystal ball has no impact on the story. I will always have a deep fondness in my heart for Florence Stonebraker, so her failure in this book makes me doubly let down. If you would prefer to avoid philosophical quandaries and disappointment, you won’t need a crystal ball to tell you that you should probably avoid this book.

Million Dollar Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1966
Cover illustration by Darrell Greene 

When pretty Dorothy Malloy left Buttrick Hospital to become wealthy Andrew Bossart’s private nurse, her orderly world changed overnight. Young and handsome, Andrew Bossart was recovering from an accidental gunshot wound. His reputation as a dangerous ladies’ man made some people wonder if the shot had been an accident after all … Despite Dorothy’s determination to remain uninvolved, she was too attractive a girl to escape Bossart’s attention—and too good a nurse to ignore the needs of her patient. Before long she found herself entangled in an unexpected mystery, a strange romantic triangle—and a scandal that would rock the city …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.” 

“Even a hospital should be hospitable.”

“Like all career girls, you get flustered when someone behaves like you’re human.”

“I don’t think it helps a man’s innards when a bullet is shot into them.”

“There are proper and improper ways to go about achieving a desired object. You learn that quickly in surgery. You don’t incise down from the shoulder to remove an appendix. Similarly, you don’t club someone in order to reason with him.”

“In our special ways we’re all ill.”

REVIEW:
Author William Neubauer, here writing as Rebecca Marsh, is one of my favorites. His plots are usually more intricate, and his heroines are smart, hard-working, sassy gals who put up with little nonsense. The problems with his books are that the romance part of the book is usually just crammed in around the margins, barely visible; the plots can sometimes get overly confusing; and the boyfriend is sometimes not especially desirable. Here he has done pretty well, as the plot is mostly navigable, but he did stick us with a middling man. At least we scored an amazing cover illustration.

Dorothy Malloy is a surgical nurse at Neubauer’s classic Buttrick Hospital—this noble, California coast–institution has hosted at least three other of his VNRNs (TV Nurse, Pam Green Rehabilitation Nurse, and Recovery Room Nurse) and some peripheral characters in this story (Dr Lee Vaughan, with whom Dorothy lunches one day, for example, is the alleged hero of TV Nurse) are stars in other books, which is a fun bonus for the die-hard Neubauer fan. She is an ambitious lass, hoping to be promoted to assistant chief—and her ambition is viewed with some skepticism around the hospital, because why would a woman want to be promoted?

Anyway, she’s called to special Andrew Mark Bossart, a devilishly handsome playboy who has gotten himself mixed up with Lisa Locatelli, a 17-year-old student nurse at Buttrick, as well as Catherine Cowell, the owner of a large corporation in town. The young gal swears Andy proposed to her, but then dumped her for the wealthy Catherine, so she calls Catherine to give her the down-low about Andy’s sneaky dealings, and then tries to kill herself—but is saved due to fast action on the part of her nursing school roommate. Catherine calls Andy over to her beach house—and the next we see him, he’s on the OR table with a bullet in his gut, and Dorothy is part of the team commissioned to dig it out and repair the damage.

She’s then transferred to the recovery ward unit (unfortunately we didn’t cross paths with Jane Kemp while we were there) to special Andy—but this puts her out of the running for a promotion, because “in the surgical suite she had status, even a type of seniority. Logically, the longer she remained there, the better her chances would be to make the jump to rank as a junior executive. But if she were popped into a recovery-room suite, she’d be the low girl in an area where promotions were few and far between.” The transfer is happening, we learn, because the chief of the surgical unit, Miss Sipsie, is dating Joe Elyot, an orthopedic tech, who is also seeing Dorothy, whom he might possibly prefer.

The head of the recovery room, Clara Dendrock, likewise recommends that Dorothy should be transferred to another department. Clara, it turns out, is upset that Dorothy didn’t sign a petition like all the other nurses opposing the expulsion of Lisa Locatelli, who has been deemed too unstable to go on with a nursing career. Dorothy has been one of Lisa’s chief mentors, so her “betrayal” of Lisa doesn’t sit well with the other nurses, but Dorothy is an astute player, and has already discussed her opinion that Lisa should be allowed to continue with Mrs. Dolezal, the superintendent of nurses, and feels that signing the petition might undercut her chances for promotion and won’t accomplish Lisa’s reinstatement.

Caring for Andy Bossart, Dorothy has a front-row seat to the drama. Though there is no proof that Catherine shot Andy—the gun has not been recovered, without which she apparently cannot be arrested—Andy, who’d been working a high-paying job ($25,000 a year!!!) at Catherine’s company is suing Catherine for a million dollars for loss of his career and, oh yeah, that hole in his gut. When he’s finally out of the hospital, he invites Dorothy to dinner to thank her for her hard work—but has also invited Catherine and the local newspaper columnist, Millicent Haight, to the party, and Catherine beans Dorothy on the head, giving her a black eye. This injury—plus her current political situation at the hospital—leads Mrs. Dolezal to give Dorothy two weeks off to recover, and Catherine, out of gratitude that Dorothy has not pressed charges, offers Catherine use of her beach cottage—the house where Andy was shot—to recover.

There she has lovely meals and walks on the grounds, sails on Catherine’s yacht, and pleasant conversations with Catherine’s housekeeper, who is another of the locals deeply devoted to Catherine—like Dorothy’s boyfriend, Joe Elyot, who was rescued from a life in the slums when Catherine, a high school classmate, offered to pay for his schooling to fit him for the job he currently holds.

Eventually all the threads are neatly tied up—the story of what happened to the gun, the alibi that is going to get Catherine off the hook for the shooting, Lisa’s reinstatement at the hospital, and Dorothy’s career—in a manner that is mostly understandable. We even wrap up Dorothy’s love life when she announces out of the blue—many Neubauer women have this annoying habit—that she is going to marry Joe. While we are certainly happy for almost everyone, and for Dorothy’s clever playing of her career and hospital politics, I wasn’t too please to see her end up with Joe.

Joe is clearly very devoted to Catherine out of gratitude for her help—to the extent that he helps fabricate her alibi and plant false evidence, basically abetting a felony assault—but he starts out the book as something of a cad, telling Dorothy on a date that he’d kissed Catherine once and dates other women, Miss Sipsie in particular. This hurts Dorothy’s feelings, so “he condescended to lean forward quickly and give her left cheek a greasy peck. As she drew back, flushing, he laughed.” It’s so amusing to be a jerk! Later he tells Dorothy that he’s chatted with several nurses who are upset with her about the petition business and that he’d defended her “because I like you,” but then complains that feeling like he wants to defend her can push him into marriage, and he doesn’t want to get married—and somehow Dorothy takes this for a compliment, but then gets mad when he tries to persuade her to sign the petition instead of supporting her decision. Next time we see him, he’s hanging out at the beach house with Dorothy and sighing that he should have tried to marry Catherine. Two pages after that, she decides to marry him while he’s not even present. So you see we don’t have a lot to admire in him.

Another odd thing about the book is that both Catherine and Andy end up getting inpatient psychiatric care—but Lisa, the would-be suicide who clearly needs it way more than anyone, does not. Instead, everyone refers to her suicide attempt as a “goof” that she shouldn’t be punished for. Overall, though, as I have said, this is a brisk, interesting, enjoyable book with an excellent heroine to admire. If William Neubauer here has not given us his best work, it's still better than most VNRNs out there, and easily worth an afternoon of your time.

Hope Wears White

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1961
Cover illustration by Martin Koenig

Nurse Barbara Ritter looked up into Dr. Wade Fulton’s eyes. “Say you love me, darling. Say it once, please,” he pleaded. She turned her head away. “Oh, let me alone. Don’t talk any more about it. What does it matter how I feel about you? You’re going to be married to another girl.” She had lost her heart to a man who belonged to somebody else. Would time heal the hurt? Barbara found the answer to her question in this moving novel of love, friendship and dedication to a notable profession. 

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“If I had my teeth in, I’d bite you, honey.” 

“Later they drove down to the village to look at the bright lights, all five or six of them.”

REVIEW:
I’ve been feeling a little burned by Florence Stonebraker in recent years. She has written some amazing books, no question about it—five of her books have earned A-grade reviews—but she has also gotten seven C’s, so you never know if you’ve got a gem in your hands or a dud. The result is that now, as I read her books—and Hope Wears White is my 19th—if it starts out well, I am nervously waiting for the point where the story tanks. Fortunately, this book sparkled from beginning to end—but apprehension marred my enjoyment somewhat; these are the bitter side effects of this job, but I hope my work here can spare you the stinkers and deliver you only the best. 

Barbara Ritter is a nurse from the very tiny town of Springdale, Arkansas, population 2,734, where she was adopted by the local doctor and his wife. Unfortunately, she played the Cinderella to her younger sister Fern, the pair’s biological daughter: “Fern had always gotten the best of everything, while Barbara did the work of two or three servants.” Barbara has turned out all right in the end, though; after her father died, Mrs. Harriet Hope, a wealthy local widow, loaned Barbara tuition money for nursing school. Now, after four years away from home, Barbara is returning to show everyone her success. (It’s a flimsy excuse, but there it is, and we have to live with it.) Fern has not fared so well: “She acts very strange of late. She is moody: up in the clouds one minute; down in the dumps the next,” explains Mom, while others are less kind, stating simply that “Fern has some deep-seated neurosis and is seriously in need of psychiatric help.” Fortunately, there is a new psychiatric hospital in town, endowed by Harriet and run by Dr. Wade Fulton, who is quite the hunk.

Harriet has insisted that Dr. Wade hire Barbara to work at the hospital, and her first interview with Wade starts off very well, despite the fact that “I hadn’t counted on anyone quite so ornamental,” as he says, since everyone tells Barbara that she looks like Elizabeth Taylor. Barbara displays a fair amount of sass: “Do you suppose I’ll be safe, working day in and day out with this irresistible male?” she asks fellow Nurse Kitty Standish. When Wade tells Barbara he is engaged to a woman back in New York, she slyly asks him how often he writes her, saying, “I’ll bet the poor gal is all aquiver with excitement, waiting for those cards to arrive.” But the interview quickly sours, and later Kitty declares that Wade is “afraid that he’ll fall in love.” In short order Wade all but admits this to be true: Apologizing that they got off on the wrong foot, he touches her arm, and the sparks fly.

Meanwhile Fern has developed a huge crush on Wade, and is sending him love letters and turning up in his office to bat her eyes at him. One evening Barbara goes to the family house to discuss Fern’s behavior, telling her that its less than rational. She suggests that Fern seek professional help, and Fern completely wigs out. Screaming that she will kill Barbara or herself, she slams out the door and hops in the car. Barbara, for some equally insane reason, climbs in with her, and before too long Fern has driven them off a cliff. Miraculously they both survive—and Wade confesses his love, while simultaneously declaring that he cannot marry her because he is engaged to this New Yorker.

Unfortunately, there can be no easy happiness for the Barbara and Wade, because Wade is one of those annoying martyr types “whose inner strength was also his great weakness. It was unthinkable for him to let down someone who depended on him.” And so, rashly engaged years ago to a woman who has turned out to be not at all suitable for him, “it was his duty—Wade’s absolute duty” to stick with Helene Robbins, even though she has refused to marry him until he gives up his job in Arkansas and returns to New York to take up a posh practice, which he has refused to do.

Sadly, Barbara accepts the situation with little of the spine she has demonstrated to date, but she does have two feisty friends in Kitty and Harriet, both of whom exhort her to fight for her man. “No man makes up his own mind when it comes to affairs of the heart,” declares Harriet. “The girl has to make it up for him. You have to.” Barbara doesn’t, though, because she has a sister who truly hates her. Realizing where Wade’s affection lies, the scorned Fern writes a letter to Helene in New York, telling her that Wade is being seduced by the tramp he works with and is about to wriggle off the hook. Instantly jetting to Arkansas, Helene declares she will go through with the wretched wedding even though she does not love Wade, because “like every girl with good sense, I want to be married to a man worth marrying,” she frankly tells Barbara. “Wade is a successful doctor, he’ll make a name for himself, he’ll make good money—once I get him back to New York where he belongs.”

It’s not hard to imagine how this scenario is going to wrap up, though the specific details were a surprise and even funny. The writing is smart, crisp, entertaining, and often amusing, if not of the sort of humor that translates well for the Best Quotes section. I’ll acknowledge that the plot is not completely logical, and it was disappointing that Barbara, who started out with so much starch and fire, completely wilted. But the supporting cast is built of admirable characters who are very enjoyable to watch as they chew the furniture and toss off fabulous lines, such as the time Kitty scolds Barbara for working so hard in her new job: “What are you trying to prove? That you’re ten women? Or simply that the rest of us nurses are lazy slobs who should get vitamin shots to jazz up our metabolism?” We do get a good handful of Florence Stonebraker’s go-to tricks: the unloved adopted daughter, the psychotic woman, the murder attempts, the Ozark setting, the names Fern and Kitty. Here, luckily for us, she serves them up with panache and freshness, giving us a book worthy of the hope any reader has when she picks one up.

Stop-Over Nurse

By Fern Shepard
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1968 

Brenda Gregory, a nurse, was driving a drugged woman patient to the hospital when their car crashed over a cliff, the patient died in flames which burned her beyond recognition, and Brenda, surviving, suffered injuries which required plastic surgery to her face and wiped out all memory of the past. Gradually she recovered in the confines of Stop-Over House, a convalescent home in a California beach town, and even began nursing again there. Then suddenly her memory returned, and she found she had mistakenly been identified as the dead woman and was unable to prove her true identity. Furthermore, a certain quack psychiatrist who was interested in keeping her dead so she could not reveal what she knew about him was willing to swear to the lie and declare her a mental case. 

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Six miles all told! She could never walk it. She’d fall dead in her tracks.” 

REVIEW:
For the first few chapters of this book, I would have bet hefty sums that I had read it before. After a thorough search of my blog, I found a couple of books that could have been sisters to this one (the pretty good Masquerade Nurse and the god-awful Jane Arden’s Home-Coming), but no identical twins. So it was a mistaken identity, which as it happens is exactly what this book is about. Nurse Brenda Gregory had caught her awful boyfriend, psychiatrist Dr. Nelson Ludlow, injecting STP, a hallucinogenic that had its debut in the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco in the mid-1960s, into Brenda’s friend Kitty Carter. Stuffing Kitty into the car, Brenda heads for the hospital, but is hit by another car and knocked over a cliff. The resulting crash and fire kills Kitty and leave her body burned beyond recognition, while Brenda suffers amnesia and terrible facial trauma that requires the best efforts of a plastic surgeon, who has given her a different appearance. When the book begins, it’s more than a year later, Brenda is waking up at Stop-Over House, a convalescent home for people with psychiatric illness, and slowly realizes she’s an employee there, formerly a patient, and is known to all as Kitty Carter—seems Dr. Ludlow and her sister Eve had at the time of the accident both identified her as Kitty, and since she had amnesia she had been thinking she was Kitty. The trick is, how is she going to prove that she is actually Brenda if her ex-fiancé and sister say she’s not? I dunno, fingerprints? Dental records? Birth marks? Blood type? Consult a lawyer? Nah. 

Nonetheless, Brenda finds an ally in Kitty’s brother Tom Scott, who is a famous foreign correspondent and who does believe that she’s not Kitty. Tom hatches a plan to catch Dr. Ludlow in the lie: He will tell the press that he has become engaged to her, thereby getting her story into the papers—because her story on its own wouldn’t be at all interesting. The crazy ploy actually works: Ludlow takes the bait and turns up at Brenda’s house to murder her, but it seems that Tom has not bothered to take any precautions once he got the story out. Ludlow nearly succeeds, aided and abetted at every turn by Brenda herself, who first lets the psychopath in—he’s taken so many psychedelics that he thinks he’s the Roman emperor Nero—then fails to telephone the cops or shout for help, sits beside him, and takes the drink he offers her, even though she was “feeling ill with alarm,” all because “she did not want him causing a disturbance.” How considerate! Fortunately, though, two friends of Brenda’s drop by before she’s had more than a small sip of the poisoned cocktail, so she survives.

Next Ludlow tries to kill Brenda’s sister Eve, since Eve was in on the original scheme to misidentify Brenda, and then there’s another hare-brained scheme to get Dr. Ludlow to admit that “Kitty” is really Brenda, and this one succeeds, so everyone lives happily ever after. First, though, we have to a bit of dancing around, with Brenda saying that she thinks Tom doesn’t love her and Tom insisting that he really does. But I will acknowledge that the ending was actually a little sweet.

It’s not the most original of novels, and seems to be not much more than a heaping handful of Florence Stonebraker’s usual tricks—psychedelic drugs, car crashes, amnesia, crazy psychiatrists, and characters named Kitty (see her heroines in Night Nurse, Nurse Kitty’s Secret, and The New Nurse). The writing is fairly perfunctory, with no real amusing quotes to offer you, certainly not what Stonebraker is capable of (Doctor by Day, City Doctor). This is one of four books I’ve read of hers that were published in 1968; an author that busy can’t always knock it out of the park.  William Faulkner churned out what he called “potboilers”—books written largely to earn money—but some of those also earned Pulitzer prizes. Stonebraker will win no awards with this attempt to pay the rent, and more is the pity, since I know she can do so much better.

Believe in Miracles

By Florence Stuart, 

pseud. Florence Stonebraker, ©1968
Also published as Celebrity Nurse and Television Nurse

Nurse Clare Kincaid was caught in a web of conflict which was tying her in knots. Dr. Hal Grove, the handsome, brainy, rich psychiatrist, was in love with her, but he would not take on the responsibility of the child who had become so much a part of her. How could Clare leave Tracy, the five-year-old daughter of her adoptive brother Larry? The child was hungry for love and clung to her. Yet Larry, though charming, was totally irresponsible, while holding onto his hope of marrying Clare. To complicate matters still more, Jeff Haymes, a TV personality in Clare’s care, was making sensational proposals to her and extravagant promises to Tracy. Clare had to make a choice. How could she be sure she was making the right one?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“‘You should wear that white swim suit around the hospital,’ Jeff Haymes told Clare. ‘The male patients would have no further need of wonder drugs.’”

“Try some hot compresses on your heart. See if you can’t warm it up while I’m gone.”

REVIEW:

I love author Florence Stonebraker (here writing as Florence Stuart) so much that I am reluctant to actually read her books because it means there will be one less for me to enjoy (it took me more than a decade to read the last Jane Austen). I needn’t have held off with this one, because enjoy it I did not.

Here we have nurse Clare Kincaid, at 25 a well-established nurse who has managed to hook desirable Dr Hal Grove, a 38-year-old former confirmed bachelor psychiatrist of the Park Avenue type, with a thickly carpeted office suite and highly bankrolled female clientele—we know the type all too well, and he never turns out well, does he, readers? Particularly since in this case he’s a psychiatrist, as author Florence does love a psycho psychiatrist (see also A Nurse Named Courage). The writing is writ especially large here  because Clare is effectively the guardian of her five-year-old niece, whose mother is dead and whose father, Clare’s adopted brother Larry, has abandoned the girl. Little Tracy is now living with Clare and mother Rose, who has suffered several heart attacks and as a result is a near invalid likely to keel over at any second. Clare is essentially a mother to Tracy, but Dr. Hal has absolutely refused to accept Tracy into his home when he and Clare are married. Clare spends a lot of time worrying about what to do—give up Tracy for adoption? Dump Hal and fast is not high on her list of options, unfortunately, though the reader is completely unable to see why.

At work Tracy is caring for wealthy television show star Jeff Haymes, who hosts a sort of gotcha-type program where “he gets people up to interview them; then all he does is make fools of them. He’s made a big name just by insulting people.” Many nurses are won over by Jeff, but not Clare: “She did not imagine she could ever possibly like Jeff as a person.” This means, of course, that they’ll be engaged at book’s end. If Clare is not impressed, Tracy is: Clare had brought Tracy to work one day to cheer up the patients, and never mind how wildly inappropriate that is, but now Tracy is smitten with—brace yourself—“Unk Jeff,” who wants to take her to Disneyland for her birthday.

Though no one has ordered a psych consult, Hal takes it upon himself to interview Jeff, who is recovering from his second plane crash, and tells Jeff that he has suicidal tendencies. Jeff responds by beaning Hal on the head with a crystal ball, and I am not kidding, which makes me think Hal may have a point. And now Hal is insisting Clare stay away from Jeff—but she goes to his room to tell him to stop making empty promises to her lonely little niece. Instead Jeff turns the tables and asks Clare about her own empty promises to Tracy, whom she is considering abandoning to strangers when she marries Hal. Jeff then suggests that he could get Tracy some work in TV commercials so Clare could afford to hire a nanny to look after Tracy while she’s at work. Despite herself, Clare starts to think this Jeff guy isn’t so bad …

Especially after her next date with Hal, when he says he’s arranged the adoption for Tracy that Care had not even agreed to, that he’s taken a job in the Midwest and Clare can come too, get a job, and undergo psychoanalysis—and when she’s cured of her “neurotic attachment to her little niece,” they can be married. Clare rightly calls Hal “a smug, self-centered, swollen-headed creep”—but it that the end of the engagement? Heck, no! It’s not even the end of the date! She lets Hal drive her home, but “there were not let’s-kiss-and-make-up embraces,” which teaches Hal to be a better person.

Or maybe not, because before long, we are questioning Hal’s sanity—and you knew we would. “He ranted and raved; he paced the floor and pounded his fists on the semi-circular metal desk. His face thinned; his cheeks turned a purplish hue.” And we’re only on page 72. There’s still a lot of plot to get through, such as Larry’s very alarming pass at his sister Clare, his decision to take Tracy back and make a lot of money off her impending TV career, Hal’s idea to kidnap Tracy with Jeff’s help, Clare and Tracy’s several appearances on Jeff’s show, including one in which Jeff proposes to Clare on air. In the end, there’s a big showdown in which Tracy is shot “just a fraction above her heart,” and though the injury is described as “just a flesh wound,” but she really whacked her head when she fell down and has been in a coma and on the critical list for a week, and “almost didn’t make it.” Nevermind about gunshot wounds; it’s those bumps on the head that will really kill you.

So many elements of this story are the usual tricks from author Florence Stonebraker’s repertoire: the psycho (Nurse Under Fire, The Nurse from Alaska, and of course Psychiatric Nurse), the unwanted yet fiercely fought-over child (The Nurse from Alaska, Runaway Nurse), the adopted daughter (Ozark Nurse). There is none of the gorgeous writing that she can be capable of (run, do not walk, to find City Doctor and Doctor by Day), and here she’s developed an annoying habit of dropping the quotation marks halfway through a quote and paraphrasing the remainder of the remarks. The characters are not particularly likeable, as Clare is a pathetic pushover who on one hand claims, “I can take care of myself,” but on the other can’t figure out that Hal is a horrible person. Even Jeff, the supposed love interest, is far too arrogant and pushy, telling Clare within minutes of their first meeting that he looked into the crystal ball and “this girl appeared in the crystal, plain as anything. And she had big, beautiful, golden eyes, exactly like yours. Now what do you make of that, sweetheart?” His on-air proposal to Clare screams of an overly controlling stalker, and his attentions to Tracy are too much to be anything but disturbing. This is actually the worst-rated Stonebraker novel of the 16 of her books I’ve read. If you’ve got others on your shelf, don’t bother pick up this one—not even the cover is worth looking at.

Nurse Under Fire

By Florence Stuart
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964

 

Jock had once tried to commit suicide because of his frustrated love for Nurse Ruby Compton. Now he was her patient in a psychiatric clinic and his emotional struggle was starting all over again. Ruby didn’t love him, but she pitied him too much to push him out of her life—even though his mental instability could make him dangerous. Even though being kind to Jock was ruining her chances with the doctor she really loved.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“What’s the use learning fancy words if you don’t trot them out to show how smart you are?”

 

“Ruby hated the current rage for pants, but she had to admit that Connie looked like a doll in them.”

 

“You mean I should marry a character who bores me to death, then spend the best years messing around with pots and pans and babies while he struggles through college? And turn into a worn-out old hag before he lands a job that really pays off? Uh-uh. All the fellows I know are pretty much like George. They’re poor, they bore me stiff, and all they’ve got on their minds is going to college for the rest of time and learning a lot of stuff so they’ll be big shots—some day. And they really want to marry just to have some girl around to cook and clean and make life easy for them, while they sit glued to their books. I can’t see it.”

 

“You’d be surprised how many patients we get who have cracked up simply by driving themselves to make more and more money to buy more and more things which they didn’t really need.”

 

REVIEW:

Ruby Compton is, to my eye, about as deranged as the patients she cares for at the Olive Hill Psychiatric Clinic. Her ex-beau, Jock Jordan (and what a name!), tried to hang himself six years ago when his rich father broke up his relationship with the less socially endowed Ruby, and has since nursed a major obsession with Ruby while living so recklessly that his antics on the freeway resulted in a multi-car crash that left several people critically injured and one killed. Instead of heading straight to jail, Jock’s father managed to get him committed to the booby hatch, but now his time is served and Jock is going home. And insisting that Ruby escort him on the 100-mile drive. Given the fact that she’s had no compunction about serving as Jock’s nurse, it was a long shot that she would agree with her boyfriend, hospital physician Nat Casey, that it would be best if she skipped that trip.

 

So off she goes—even bringing her 17-year-old sister Connie on the trip. The jaded Connie has designs on the wealthy Jock, and it comes out that she’s even been visiting him on the sly in an attempt to land herself a rich husband. “So what if he is a psycho?” she asks. “If Jock were to fall in love with a cute girl, get out of that place and get married, I’ll bet he’d be as normal as anybody.”

 

Of the actual road trip, which has been built up for 55 pages, we get not a sentence: After Ruby’s final argument with Nat, the next sentence has her pulling into Jock’s father’s house. Joe Jordan is away on a business trip, though, and Jock’s stepmother Dorothy refuses to allow Jock to come into the house, instead steering him and Ruby—Connie has been deposited at a local hotel—to the gatehouse: “I’m scared of crazy people,” she explains. But Ruby insists that they be allowed to stay in the main house. Once back in his old room, Jock is “brooding and staring, like someone in a stuporous daze,” and Ruby is concerned that this might be one of Jock’s “depressed spells which, once or twice, had come close to being a psychotic breakthrough.” Her solution is to take Jock and Connie out for dinner. Connie is all in favor of this plan: “Hey, it is okay if I douse myself with that perfume that Mom says smells like a hussy’s boudoir?” she asks her sister. But out at the restaurant, when Connie begs Jock to dance, Ruby reminds her, “He’s not supposed to dance. Doctor’s orders.” Because we all know that dancing can cause psychosis, especially the Wahtusi.

 

So while Connie finds someone else to boogie with, Jock takes the opportunity to beg Ruby, again, to marry him. When she refuses, he asks if she’s in love with someone else—and she lies to him. But when Connie returns to the table and is again rebuffed by Jock, she decides to settle the score by telling him that Ruby is engaged to Dr. Nat. Jock responds by taking a trip to the loo and not returning. In another dramatic jump between scenes, we are back at the oceanfront Jordan house, and Ruby spots someone swimming—gosh, who could that be at this time of night? Instantly she is powering through the waves, dragging Jock’s limp body back to shore, and pumping the salt water from his lungs. The paramedics arrive and bundle him up to bring back to the house (not the hospital), and now Ruby has another disaster to cope with: Mrs. Jordan, and she is pissed. “Lucy tells me what that lunatic has been up to: trying to kill himself again, making trouble and disturbance for everyone,” she shrieks, insisting that it’s out to the gatehouse with Ruby and Jock. Or not; Ruby insists that Dorothy go to her room: “Must I remind you that I am a psychiatric nurse? I have been trained to use force when it becomes necessary.” And it does become necessary, so Ruby seizes Dorothy Jordan in a judo hold and locks her in her own bedroom. What a gal!

 

Nat shows up unexpectedly, fortunately before Mr. Jordan gets home, so he can break the news about all the goings-on. Amazingly, Pa Jordan lets everyone stay, and in the morning has a heart-to-heart with Ruby in which he offers her $1 million if she will marry Jock. Next thing we know, the whole gang is back at Olive Hill, and Ruby is actually, amazingly, thinking over the offer: “Even if there is no more than once chance in a thousand, I must see that he gets that chance,” Ruby tells Nat. “I cannot have it on my conscience that I might have saved Jock from a living death, and did not.”

 

Only a bout of pneumonia keeps Ruby from eloping with Jock at once. But that gives Connie time to cook up a plan to prevent the marriage—yes, Connie, the girl who at book’s open deplored poverty, now declares that “what she really wanted was to marry some nice guy, love him to death, have a cute little house, and kids, and all the stuff most girls wanted.” So off Connie goes to see Dorothy, and tells her that $1 million of her husband’s precious fortune will slip through her fingers if Ruby marries Jock. Dorothy instantly reaches for the little pearl-handled revolver she keeps hidden amongst her underthings and hops into her black Caddy with the red leather seats to pay Jock a visit. She tells Jock about the bribe—and that Ruby is planning to go through with it, then have him committed to an insane asylum, annul the marriage and run off with Nat. She offers him her car and some money—$60, the cheapskate—but Jock’s not that dumb. He grabs the gun instead, knocks Dorothy down—poor Dorothy seems to have a “kick me” sign on her back—and heads for Nat’s office, just as Ruby herself is trotting down the Olive Hill corridors with the same destination. Oh, how will it all end?

 

The four or five final paragraphs of the book are actually quite sweet, but the perfunctory and plodding 17 preceding chapters are a hard slog. When the heroine holds multiple enormously flawed opinions, it’s hard to feel very sympathetic toward the little dunce. Florence Stonebraker pulls out a few great scenes in this book, but Nurse Under Fire is no match for her best works (i.e. City Doctor, The Nurse and the Orderly, Runaway Nurse). I love Florence Stonebraker enough that I could never just dismiss one of her books as not worth reading, but I do have to say, sadly, that you needn’t put this one at the top of your reading pile.

Psychiatric Nurse

By Fern Shepard

(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1967
Cover illustration by Armand Weston

Nurse Tracy Ross had many reasons for going home. Her mother needed her … and she needed a rest from the terrible strain she had been under. But her welcome was marred by the shocking realization that you can’t go home again. The problems she fled were neither as immediate nor as difficult as the ones she faced now. Back in her home town, she found herself working with a doctor with whom she had once been violently in love. That was hard enough in itself … but even more difficult was the terrible secret she carried within her breast. Ethically, she could not reveal it … but if she kept it hidden, many lives were doomed to tragedy!

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“And why shouldn’t it rub him the wrong way to be informed in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t the six-foot bundle of perfection which he seemed to believe he was?”

REVIEW:
Once again, we find that Florence Stonebraker has teased us again with her title. Tracy Ross is actually working in pediatrics, but she used to be a psychiatric nurse. It was then that she first met Fern Wilson, a volunteer at the hospital who appears more than a little unbalanced. She tells a seven-year-old girl dying of leukemia that she is going to burn in hell after she dies, and when a mysterious fire erupts outside of town, most people think it was started by “a bunch of juvenile delinquents,” but Tracy knows better. Unfortunately, her professional oath prevents her from alerting the town to the fact that there’s a nut job in their midst.

Fern (again, as in College Nurse, Florence has named a character after her pseudonym) is doing well since Tracy last saw her; she is now engaged to widower Dr. Bert Brooks, the hospital chief of staff. But she’s not taking well to Bert’s daughter, Cathy, who is seven. She accuses Cathy of having stolen a photograph of Bert’s deceased wife out of his study and burned it, and Bert locks Cathy in her room for an entire day because Cathy says it was actually Fern who took and burned the photo.

Tracy knew Bert when they were children, and had been hopelessly smitten with him, crying during his wedding for the wrong reasons. Now she’s not sure how she feels about him. Bert is suave, handsome, “ambitious to attract wealthy patients and cash in on his work,” and would have “done wonderfully well as a con man,” as many of his aging women patients fall under his spell and leave him a bundle after their deaths, and never mind about that little conflict of interest in someone whose profession is purportedly to keep people alive. But her long-standing relationship with him puts Tracy in a unique position to be able to try to set Bert straight. She tells him that though he may be successful professionally, he’s “a failure as a person” and “a spoiled, irresponsible mama’s boy.” Needless to say, he isn’t exactly brought around to Tracy’s way of thinking about himself or Fern.

In the meantime, Tracy has Dr. Larry Sizer on her side at the hospital. Larry agrees that Fern is a lunatic, since the leukemia patient was his, but Larry doesn’t have a lot of influence with Bert, who is trying to get Larry kicked out of the hospital because he occasionally uses hypnosis in his treatments. So even though her ethics have kept her from spilling the beans about Fern to Bert, there she is, before the book is half over, telling Larry about how Fern was brought into the psych hospital “dangerously berserk,” but after shock treatments and analysis, she underwent a miracle cure and was dismissed from the hospital as cured. Larry’s take on this is that Tracy is still in love with Bert and is jealous, even though he thinks Fern is a “vapid-faced … first-class idiot.” So she and Larry fight a lot, then literally kiss and make up, then fight some more.

Eventually Fern drives Tracy to the outskirts of town and tries to shoot her, but Tracy calls on her training and uses a “trick she had learned through practice, how to twist and hold helpless the arm of a deranged patient,” pitches the gun out the window, clubs Fern on the head and escapes on foot back to town. But Fern has beaten her there and told Bert that it was Tracy who was the attacker. She has also told Bert that she was admitted to the asylum—to research the treatment of the insane for a book she was writing, and she was just pretending to be a lunatic while she was there. In the meantime, Fern has planted stolen jewelry in Cathy’s room and helped Bert find it, so Bert has concluded that his daughter is “pre-psychotic” and needs to be committed. He tells this to Tracy when he meets her after the attack, and suggests that Tracy herself needs to check in for a little rest.

That night, Cathy runs away to Tracy’s house, having escaped out the window from her room, where Bert has locked her again. Larry scoops up Cathy and Tracy and carts them off to his cabin in the woods, which many VNRN doctors seem to own for the sole purpose of sheltering persecuted nurses until their would-be assassin tracks them down there just minutes before the hero walks in and saves her. Psychiatric Nurse runs true to the form, except that Fern unexpectedly lights herself on fire and burns to death rather than be caught: “Daddy, I’m on my way,” she screams as she sprints for her stash of kerosene outside. “You always said I’d burn in hell for being so naughty, and here I go!” This may well be the most magnificent VNRN stage exit to date.

We know this is a book about psychiatry because it is packed with technical jargon: little Cathy is “seriously deranged,” Tracy fears she is “cracking up,” Larry worries he is “going nuts,” Bert believes Fern was never a “mental case,” Bert’s housekeeper thinks Bert has “lost some of his marbles,” Tracy recalls the basic rule from psychiatric training, “never let a psycho know you are afraid.” Tracy is not the most endearing heroine, as she regularly turns peevish on Bert and Larry, and even Fern, in the role of beautiful evil vixen, isn’t what she could be. The plot holds promise, but it just wasn’t executed all that well. The writing is nowhere near Florence’s best (consider that I could only find one decent Best Quote), and just grinds through the story without inspiration or even much interest. Sometimes Florence has got it, and sometimes she doesn’t. In Psychiatric Nurse, not so much.

Jet Set Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1970
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

They were island hopping, flitting from one tropical paradise to another … laughing readily, drinking steadily—wealthy heiress Marlaine Hayden, her fifth husband, Noah, her financier cousin, Durward, and an entourage of hangers-on. Why did they add Nurse Roxy Ferris, blue-eyed, beautiful and disapproving, to their glittering, glamorous caravan? Someone had to watch over Marlaine’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Gee Gee, a gorgeous child, really, with a genius I.Q. but with a personality her private-school principal had called sick … “very sick.” Gee Gee’s was a rare malady, an infection destined to endanger them all!

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I shouldn’t even consider ending my blessed bachelorhood with a girl who can’t mix a decent martini.”

“Another ring on her parched hands would have tilted her to starboard.”

REVIEW:
Wealthy Wall Street financier Durwood Kingsley is recovering from a heart attack under the care of Nurse Roxy Ferris. He’s also attempting to persuade her to marry him, but she won’t. For starters, she’s decided that she will never marry a man who doesn’t “share my interest in medicine.” (You can bet she doesn’t mean an orderly.) Furthermore, like many a VNRN heroine, she is recovering from a broken heart: Her previous fiancé, after the invitations had been mailed, decided he didn’t want to be married or a doctor and ran off to San Francisco to write poetry, study Zen Buddhism, and play the sitar.

In his efforts to persuade her that he can do something other than work, Durwood invites Roxy to accompany him and Marlaine, his newly married sister (this is her fifth husband), on a tour of the Caribbean by private jet. She will be needed to tend to Marlaine’s daughter, Gee Gee, who is 16 and, in Roxy’s words, a “weirdie”: She’s voluptuous, contemptuous of her mother, a genius, and plotting to ensnare her new stepfather, who she thinks is “masculine and sexy.” There’s also an entourage of pathetic rich people, including an astrologer, an aging tennis star, a French art film actress, a Russian prince, and a Colombian coffee magnate. And Dr. Noah Hayden, “Daddy Five,” as Gee Gee calls him. Roxy, upon clapping eyes on the medicine man, is instantly smitten, and spends a lot of time chastely wishing he weren’t married.

The travelers are soon identified as a party of lazy drunks hurtling from one entertainment to the next; Roxy and Noah are the only two who find this activity nauseating. Noah spends a lot of time “talking sense to Marlaine, pleading with her to stop drinking, to stop running, to end her shallow existence and begin living as the wife of a dependable, devoted physician.” It never works, and a few pages after these heart-to-hearts, she’s found screaming with wild laughter on the dance floor, clutching her fourth martini glass.

Before long, Roxy and Noah are strolling on a beach in Trinidad at sunset. Noah tells Roxy that his previous fiancée was discovered returning from a weekend away, not visiting her mother, but with an ex-boyfriend. He’d fled to Las Vegas, drunken too much, and woken up married to a virtual stranger. But he’s such a good guy, so devoted to the institution of marriage, that he decides he loves Marlaine and is determined to make a go of it. But his long walk with Roxy leads them both to realize “we sensed a rapport that had no right to exist.” I sure didn’t see that coming.

Most of the book is one party after another; Roxy psychoanalyzing Gee Gee (“No child could have emerged from her background unscarred … only a thoroughly miserable youngster would seek attention with destruction and hysteria.”); Noah shouting at his drunk wife, breaking her bar glasses, and punching would-be sycophants in the mouth; Gee Gee pitching hysterical rampages; and Noah suggesting that the best cure for her would be a lobotomy. Finally they decide on a cruise, a “quiet relaxation” with just the family—which, in addition to the Haydens, includes Durwood, Roxy, and eight of Marlaine’s dearest drinking buddies. One night Roxy wakes up in the night and finds Gee Gee missing from her bunk, and when the entire yacht rises to search for her, it is determined that Marlaine is also missing—and then Gee Gee turns up safe and sound in her bunk. It is soon determined that Marlaine has gone overboard in the night, and Gee Gee accuses Roxy of having murdered her in an attempt to win Noah for herself, but Roxy knows that Gee Gee is in fact the guilty party. In retrospect she realizes, too late, that it was a terrible mistake not to inform everyone about Gee Gee’s morbid obsession with the “ruthless genius” of Emperor Christophe, who suppressed the “crummy, expendable natives” of Haiti: “Can’t you almost smell blood and hear wild shrieks?” Gee Gee had asked Roxy in “enraptured fascination with horror.”

Roxy does eventually clear her name, but only by a chance stroke of luck, not through any actual intelligence on her part. The book doesn’t close on her in Noah’s arms but instead a year later, the two of them having endured an enforced separation, waiting for an appropriate amount of time to pass before the widowed Noah can see her again. This book is not one of Jane Converse’s best, without even much camp that she can usually do so well, and we certainly know she can do better (e.g. Surf Safari Nurse, Nurse in Crisis). I’m always a bit disappointed with books that purport to take you inside a glamorous world but then sneer at it, suggesting that we poor stiffs in dungarees are so much better off than wealthy people living on luxurious yachts or in staffed Caribbean villas. None of the sumptuousness of this lifestyle is given to us in this book, just drunken tirades and pathetic sycophants. It’s too easy to villainize a way of life you can’t have, and in the end it makes this book not very much fun.

The Nurse from Alaska

By Florence Stuart 

(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1964 

Also published as Strange Triangle

Nurse Carol had loved Doctor Mike since she was fifteen—and now, at last, she was to be his wife, work by his side, raise his young daughter as her own. Then, on the eve of their wedding, the glamorous and beautiful Beth Bliss came back to town from Alaska—and demanded that Doctor Mike be hers. She had three powerful weapons: she had been Mike’s wife, she knew a strange secret—and she was Nurse Carol’s own sister.

GRADE: B- 

BEST QUOTES: 

“He thought about all that Carol would be giving up to take on the care and responsibility of his child by another woman. In particular, she would be sacrificing her nursing career. Whenever they discussed this problem, Carol would smile at his doubts. She would remind him that she was, first of all, a woman, and a woman in love.” 

“The love of her life was as close as the nearest mirror.” 

“I’d like to sit at the bar and smoke a cigarette. Maybe somebody will take me for an abandoned woman who has really loved and refuses to quit.” 

“Carol didn’t want to think about what might happen if the child was taken away from both her and her father, to be given over to the mother she instinctively hated. It could lead to deep emotional disturbance, even brain damage.” 

“She was as efficient as an IBM machine if anything went wrong.” 

“You’re suffering from a rush of blood to the head, darling.” 

“As long as the little girl remains in this hospital, she will have proper nursing care, from a competent person who neither threatens her nor allows her to wander around and hemorrhage in a closet.” 

“Give me a prescription for some barbiturates with real authority.” 

“It seems to have become a habit with you, dear. When you can’t think what else to do, you must say to yourself, Well, I can always run over and threaten to ruin Mel Walters as a doctor.” 

“Let’s say I tuned in on some vibrations saying that you needed me, sweetheart.” 

REVIEW: 

I am irritated by false advertising in a book’s title. Now, The Nurse from Alaska does not exactly qualify, since the anti-heroine, Beth Bliss, has in fact arrived in town from Alaska, but the story takes place in Kentucky, and there are no snow-topped mountains, fur parkas, or totem poles anywhere in the book except in the cover illustration (which, if somewhat irrelevant, is excellent). I think this gives author Florence Stonebraker, who we have met before as Florence Stuart and Fern Shepard, a near 100 percent average in this respect. 

Beth has returned home after her impending marriage to an Alaskan millionaire was undone by an inconvenient plane crash. She’s heard that Dr. Mike Conway, whom she left five years ago with their infant daughter Joannie, has come into $3 million. But like all VNRN medicos who inherit millions, Mike intends to use every dime (and the easily nauseated might wish to avert their eyes) to build a new hospital to help poverty-stricken orphans. He also intends to marry Carol Bliss, but gorgeous, evil Beth turns up in his office and sobs on his shoulder that she has incurable leukemia, and he develops the spine of a jellyfish. She wants to marry him again so she can be with little Joannie and have a family again in her last remaining year on this earth. The money means nothing to her, nothing at all. But if he doesn’t marry her, she’ll go to court and get sole custody of Joannie. 

To stall her, he agrees to let her take Joannie away for a week, though he knows the child despises Beth and hasn’t seen or heard from her in five years, and agrees to postpone his wedding to Carol—which was supposed to be tomorrow, by the way. Beth is a nurse herself and worked with local GP Dr. Mel Walters years ago in New York, and knows that his young wife, dying of cancer and in extreme pain, had begged him to put her out of her misery with an extra-large helping of morphine. He refused to do it, but someone else in the hospital did—and though no evidence had been found against him, he was dismissed from the hospital. Beth threatens to reveal the whole story, which would ruin Mel’s career, if he doesn’t back up her leukemia act. He agrees, but insists on doing a complete physical exam … “At the end of that hour his eyes were grave, his tone that of a serious medical man. … ‘I’m afraid I have a little bad news for you,’ he said.” 

The plot thickens when Beth goes to court anyway and gets sole custody of Joan for 30 days. Carol and Mike are helpless, though they greatly fear that Beth is insane, “and psychos can be very dangerous,” says the man with the medical degree. When they break the news to Joannie, she becomes violently ill with “quinsy,” or peritonsillar abscess, which she apparently gets regularly (I will spare you the details of why this is medically unlikely), and has to be admitted to the hospital. There, Beth comes marching in wearing a nurse’s uniform, fires Mike and Carol from the case, and assumes complete control of Joannie’s medical care, because she has a court order, darn it! 

As Carol looks on, Beth proceeds to punch Joannie so hard she knocks her off the bed and threatens to take a strap to her. Carol, instead of running straight to the nursing supervisor, goes to Mike’s office, where the pair have some brandy to buck themselves up before they go off to do this emergency appendectomy on “the town’s confirmed old maid” who is “thirtyish.” It actually takes the night nurse, who has no more authority than Carol, to have Beth thrown out of the hospital after she guesses what Carol should have known all along, that Beth does not have permission to work as a nurse in the hospital, much less a Kentucky nursing license, and that abusing patients makes her unfit for the job in any case. I was hoping that the night nurse might be the one to end up with custody, since she seemed to be the only one capable of actually protecting poor Joannie. 

No such luck—after Joannie is discharged, Beth turns up on Mike’s door, out of her mind with fear because she has to have a hysterectomy to cure her cancer. “She thought about the patient, just her own age, who had gone through such an operation in the New York hospital. Oh, she had lived. A hundred percent cure, the doctors said. And when Beth ran into her, months later, she looked like an old hag of seventy. Her skin was all dried out and grooved with a thousand wrinkles. It had to do with cutting off nature’s supply of female hormones. When they went, your youth went.” To get her mind off the surgery, Mike, the blithering idiot, tells Beth that Carol has taken Joannie to Mike’s house in the mountains. How incompetent can the man be? Guess where Beth goes when she leaves Mike’s office? Well, after she stops at the hotel for a gin and tonic? 

Author Florence Stonebraker loves a sexy woman (see Runaway Nurse) and a violent woman (The Nurse and the Orderly, Courtroom Nurse, Night Nurse). Here we get both in one package, but Beth just isn’t as satisfying as she could be. I laughed at the old faked-illness-comes-true plot, and the issue of Beth’s uterus as the source of her vitality could spawn several term papers. I did wonder if it wouldn’t turn out that it was Beth who actually bumped off Dr. Mel’s wife, which would have made a lot of sense, but the true “killer” was never identified; perhaps Stonebraker intended to write this in but forgot about it. The Nurse from Alaska is a fairly typical Stonebraker story, between the motherless child, the sexy ex-wife, the child abuse, and the psychos (it even has the sassy sidekick), but it’s not one of her best. I don’t care if the plot is hackneyed, but the central characters need to be admirable, and their inability to see the obvious (that Beth has no right to care for Joannie in the hospital) or protect their child makes them not so. The book isn’t a complete waste of time, but it’s vaguely dissatisfying, and not the first I’d reach for.

This book was also
published as Strange Triangle,
with a much worse cover.