Collecting Book

Resort Nurse

By Diana Douglas

When lovely Elizabeth Spencer, R.N., made up her mind to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and see for herself what went on in the outside world, she never expected anything like her job at Key Sud—the luxury Florida hotel where female attributes seemed more important than nursing qualificiations. She also never expected to be working with a doctor as handsome as Kimball Brown—nor with a nurse’s aide who was a very rich, very pretty, seventeen-year-old hippie with much too grown-up ideas. But the biggest surprise of all was James Scott Haldane, the savagely good-looking author who threw Elizabeththe curve of her life … and forced her to wonder whether she was ever meant to be a nurse at all.

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:

“With her legs pressed together, she was feeling uncomfortable in the overly short uniform the management had insisted even the hotel nurse should wear.”

“You’re an intelligent girl, Elizabeth, and very, very attractive. I’ll be surprised if you remain a nurse for very long.”

“It was her eyes that fascinated him—those glorious, golden-brown, slightly slanted eyes. He had seen Eurasian girls with eyes shaped like that, but with most Eurasians there was an impenetrability behind them. These eyes were different—vital, utterly feminine, and full of changing expressions. And they were wholly American.”

“Women should only hide their eyes behind sunglasses if they have very pale, mean, blue eyes. Or if they have a squint.”

“You’re still a kid until you marry.”

“Rita was rather a plain girl with mousy hair and pale blue eyes, but she was cheerful and efficient, and beneath her mini-skirt she had perfect legs which, as far as the men on the staff were concerned, more than compensated for her face.”

“She was twenty-five years old, and she supposed it was time she thought of marriage with the right guy. But how did a girl go about finding the right guy? At one time she had thought that if he were tall, dark, and handsome, and two or three years her senior, that would be sufficient. But now she knew that this was not enough. A lot of other things came into it. Love and marriage should be for keeps, and that meant a great deal more than just physical attraction in a man.”

“I don’t believe any drug can put into the mind what isn’t there. The impulse must already be present, whether the addict knows it or not. But he or she has been told that this is what the drug will do, and, because they want to feel that particular way, they take it, and suggestion does the rest.”

“A doctor friend once told me that the difference between an heroin addict and an alcoholic is that the alcoholic gets high and goes home to beat his wife, but a heroin addict goes home and his wife beats him.”

REVIEW:

I don’t pick up a Diana Douglas/Richard Wilkes-Hunter book with any eagerness whatsoever, and Resort Nurseis yet another reason why. They—and this—are superficial, stupid, patronizing, and perfunctory. And a little creepy; the heroines are usually ridiculously beautiful with “slim, high-breasted figures,” and in the case of Elizabeth Spencer, R..N., brains and personality—or so we are told, though we see little evidence of either in any of the pages that follow. Exhibit A: Elizabeth has left her job at a hospital because she’s decided “to escape the narrow confines of hospitals and to see for herself, for a while, a little more of what went on in the outside world. Life owed her that, she had decided, and this had been the argument she had used to escape, no matter how briefly, from discipline and routine. She had tried private nursing, at first, but had found the patients demanding and irritable.” So right off the bat, Elizabethcomes across as a lazy whiner.

She’d seen an ad for a nurse at a resort in Key Sud, Florida, and now she’s in Miami, being subjected to an unnerving interview with her boss, who insists, “When we’re alone, call me Marvin. That’s one thing you learn in the hotel business. People in high places come to detest formality, Elizabeth. They have too much of it in their work. Success is a lonely thing. It’s made me a lonely man. That’s why I want you to call me Marvin.” Next thing he’ll be telling her that his wife doesn’t understand him. When she finally shakes him off, she can’t get a cab, and when a handsome hotel guest offers her a ride in his “powerful white sports car,” she hops right in. It turns out that her escort is James Scott Haldane, a very successful novelist. She immediately dissects his latest play, which she didn’t like at all, and when he drops her off, “she had been ready to refuse an invitation to dine with him—or at least to go out with him again. Now she felt frustrated and angry: He hadn’t asked her at all. He hadn’t even bothered to ask her name!” So when James Scott Haldane calls her later to ask her out for a drink, she gets all pissy and hangs up on him. The next day she heads to the beach for an early swim and is “indignant” when he doesn’t show up, angry when he doesn’t call her. “Not that it mattered, she told herself, because neither did she have the slightest interest in James Scott Haldane.” Clearly.

But while in Miami, she inadvertently stumbles into a club for a cup of coffee and finds out it’s a drug den, with a couple of stoned teenaged hippies dancing in the back. Now we get a pages-long lecture about how evil LSD is and how it causes genetic defects and “leukemia-like symptoms of cell abnormality” (it doesn’t). Ham-handed foreshadowing is a specialty of the author, so I shouldn’t be surprised, but it’s still irritating.

Once Elizabeth reaches the hotel, she is working with Dr. Kimball Brown, who “was not at all like James Scott Haldane.” Their biggest medical concern is Mrs. Connell, a pregnant woman with a heartrate of 42 and hyperemesis gravidarum, which the good doctor tells the patient, is “primarily caused by a neurotic influence, so you see how important it is for you to try to control your vomiting and not worry.” He asks her to “help us by trying not to expect to be ill every time you eat something.” His treatment is bed rest in a darkened room, codeine for sedation, and—the obvious treatment for someone who is bradycardic and vomiting excessively—fluid and diet restriction. He tells Elizabeth privately that hyperemesis gravidarum is “one of the toxemias”—an older term for pre-eclampsia (it is not)—and that “left untreated it could have led to dehydration,” so again, one does wonder why the doctor has ordered fluid restriction. Elizabeth is also told to position Mrs. Connell in bed “so she can’t inhale any vomitus while she’s under heavy sedation.” God help this poor woman, because the doctor obviously won’t.

After Mrs. Connell is soundly mismanaged, the next person to walk into the clinic is a 17-year-old girl in a “brief mini-skirt, a white sweater that accentuated her young, pert breasts, and she wore the pale makeup that kids seemed to find attractive.” And so I recalled with further dismay that Wilkes-Hunter never described a woman without mentioning her breasts. Sharon Miller asks about the “dangerous drug cabinet”—where could thatpossibly be going?—and then, “How much of a drag is it? Learning to be a nurse, I mean.” Elizabethquickly assures the teen that “nurses have boyfriends they go out on dates with, the same as anyone else,” and adds, “I guess one of these days I’ll get married and that will be the end of my nursing career.” The more this book progresses, the less I like Elizabeth Spencer, R.N. Sharon asks if she can help out in the clinic, “as a sort of nurse’s aide,” to decide if she wants be a nurse in the same mold as Elizabeth: “Where I worked wouldn’t matter as long as I don’t have to be ‘dedicated.’ I could work until I got tired of it or wanted to marry some guy.” The ugly mirror Sharon is holding up to Elizabeth passes, needless to say, unnoticed.

It isn’t long before Sharon asks Elizabethto “give me one of those pep pills,” and helpfully suggests amphetamine, or, when Elizabethbalks at that, “benzedrine then.” Elizabethgives her a lecture instead, but decides Sharon’s interest in drugs “was not important,” and assigns Sharon to sit up all night with and dispense medication to pregnant Mrs. Connell, who is vomiting, hopefully while positioned on her side, despite the codeine. Poor Mrs. Connell’s prospects of surviving her medical treatment are growing increasingly dim.

Outside of work, Elizabeth is just full of bright ideas: She goes on a date in Miamiwith her lonely boss, Marvin, and between the two of them they consume a magnum of champagne. Amazingly still consious after this, she has him drive (!!!) her back to the seedy club for coffee, where they spot a girl who looks like Sharon Miller, apparently the same hippie stoner Elizabethhad seen gyrating wildly the last time she’d dropped in. Rather than try to chase the girl down, they convince themselves that it isn’t really Sharon and drive back to the hotel, Sharon’s head “pillowed carelessly on Marvin’s shoulder,” and nevermind the four or five times she’s hoped he wasn’t going to make a pass at her; she gives him an “almost sisterly kiss.” At this point I am wondering if the author wants us to hate Elizabethin particular or if he hates all women in general. (Actually, I’ve read enough of his books to believe it’s the latter.)

One can only hope it’s a massive hangover that impairs her judgment and not her basic lack of sense when, the next day, Elizabeth asks Sharonto count the drugs in the drug cabinet. You will be shocked to find out that some amphetamines go missing—as does Sharon, who had gone to Miami for the evening. Does the penny drop? Not for our idiot heroine. She innocently asks Dr. Brown if someone might have stolen the drugs, but he is outraged at the insinuation that Sharon might have taken them, no doubt because he liked the tiny little bikini Sharonwore when he went surfing with the teen earlier.

Now Elizabeth is called to the penthouse suite, only to find—James Scott Haldane! Who finally gets around to asking Elizabeth’s name! She tells him about the missing drugs and kid, and he convinces Elizabeth that the two might be related: “She’s in the age group with too much money and too much freedom to do as she pleases. On top of that, she’s bored with her parents and is ripe for all that talk about middle-class Freudian hang-ups, indifferent parents, escapes, and so on.” The man missed his calling; he should have been a psychiatrist. So the pair climb into his powerful white sports car and head back to the club, where they chat with a groovy lad wearing a red-and-blue-striped coat and a stovepipe hat, who tells them Sharon has run off with a heroin addict named Roger. Hot on their trail, Elizabeth and James Scott Haldane find their dilapidated hideaway, break in, kick open bedroom doors, shine a flashlight around although the hall light had worked perfectly well, and find Sharon, buck naked and unconscious, on a blanket with needle marks on her “white thighs—which, along with her breasts, contrasted vividly with the rest of her suntanned body.” Next scene, it’s a few hours later and James Scott Haldane is inviting Elizabethup to the penthouse for a drink and a little conversation, which entails his ordering her to quit her job and come to his ranch in Nevadawith him, after they’re married in Miami. Ugh.

The constant references to women’s breasts; Elizabeth’s unbelievable stupidity and shallowness; the obvious, overly moralistic plot; the automatic and distasteful marriage proposal on the penultimate page—this book’s faults are many and egregious. It’s frankly insulting that the author should think Elizabethis a heroine that we should like, although to be fair, there really isn’t one single likeable character in the book, so maybe he hates everyone—though his particular disrespect for women is quite apparent. As it happens, the book’s readers will most likely be women, and it’s usually a bad idea to insult your target audience. And so I suggest you refuse to allow Wilkes-Hunter to talk down to you and decline to open his books.

Nurse Melinda

Nurse Melinda Bonner once hotly declared to her supervisor that she had enough love for all children—inside the hospital and out. But one shy, dark little boy—an orphan, with only a stern guardian for a family—had a special place in her affections. The strange circumstances under which little Pietro was brought to the hospital, and the unusual interest shown in the child by the dazzling movie star, Peter Fife, puzzle Melinda, and plunge her into an absorbing drama of human relations and emotions. What ensues taxes not only her skill as a nurse, but her heart.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“ ‘You look as fresh and gay as a sprig of white lilac on a spring day,’ the nurse told her, and added grimly, ‘Well, we’ll put a stop to that in short order.’ ”

“Well, I gotta hop down to the airport and pick up a package. And what a package! Really stacked, Chet, my boy—really stacked!”

REVIEW:

When we first meet Nurse Melinda Bonner, she is on the job on the pediatric orthopedics ward, and a 12-year-old boy has just offered up “a very creditable wolf whistle.” Does she respond with a stern lecture about respect and appropriate behavior? “ ‘Why, thank you, Tommy,’ she said brightly. ‘That’s very flattering.’ ” I am old enough to remember the days when men—construction workers, mostly—would whistle at you, and I found it only creepy.

After this, though, Melinda firmly establishes herself as a woman with convictions and backbone steady enough to stand up for them. In fact, on the third page, she’s been called into the office of hospital Chief Dr. Grayle and dressed down for hugging five-year-old Pietro Gardella, recovering from a clubfoot repair. This, she is told, violates the hospital’s number-one rule: Don’t get involved with a patient. Pietro is an orphan being raised by a guardian, so if the boy becomes too attached to Melinda, Dr. Grayle says, “When he leaves here, he will grieve himself sick for you.” But Melinda refuses to promise she will stop being affectionate to her young charges: “I feel very sure that gentleness and affection and understanding of their small problems are as important to their recovery as all your medical skill,” she tells him. “I assure you, Doctor, I have enough love in my heart to embrace every child in the hospital—and out of it, too!” Her devotion to children is so great that even when they get a “spoiled rotten stinker,” Melinda defends them as “scared,” insisting they will “settle down,” and tells her co-workers they should never call their patients “brat.”

When she meets Mrs. Lansdowne, Pietro’s guardian, she’s more convinced than ever that she’s right to shower little Pietro with love: His guardian is “quite cold” and has visited the boy only once, to tell him that his “wretched” kitten, “a nasty, messy nuisance,” has disappeared and was probably run over. Melinda is horrified by this “old witch,” who, she tells Dr. Grayle, clearly terrifies Pietro and cares not a whit for him. It breaks Melinda’s heart to think that Pietro must go home to this “stern, self-righteous” ogre, but what can be done?

Then teen heartthrob Peter Fife visits the floor to take publicity photos of him handing out toys to sick children. Melinda, far from being impressed, is disgusted at the disturbance to the hospital routine and the way that the children are being used to further Peter’s image. But when Peter reaches little Pietro’s bed, he is suddenly transfixed by the boy. The two begin speaking in Italian, and Peter orders the photographers away. After bonding with Pietro, he asks Melinda to dinner. Though she despises him and everything he stands for, she agrees only because she loves Pietro, and over dinner at his house later, Peter explains that he is actually Pietro’s father—which comes as no surprise to the reader. He’d been in Italy shooting a film and fallen in love with a young Italian woman there. They’d secretly married, but Angelina’s family had spirited her away when they found out about it. Peter had been unable to find her, and had not even known she was pregnant. Then he was drafted into the Army, and when he got out years later he hired private investigators, who’d learned that Angelina had died in childbirth and that his son had been placed in the care of a guardian and was in the U.S. for treatment for a club foot. He’d been combing the pediatrics wards of American hospitals ever since, in the event that his son might turn up there. Now through the miracles of bad plotting they’ve found each other, but Peter has no proof that he is Pietro’s father, so he can’t just claim the lad outright. But if only Melinda will marry him, he will be able to adopt the boy and they can all live happily ever after!

She emphatically declines, thankfully, but curiously tells Peter, “I am sure Miss Lansdowne loves Pietro and is good to him,” though she herself has seen first-hand that neither one is true. She adds, “A nurse would be of very little value to a hospital if she went around giving out bits of her heart to every child who comes under her care.” Exactly what we’re supposed to make of her lies and hypocrisy is unclear.

In the next few weeks Peter visits Pietro often—remember, these are the days when patients stayed in the hospital for months—and his devotion begins to melt Melinda’s frost. Eventually Pietro is healed and sent off to Florida with “grim” Miss Lansdowne, and Melinda’s cries as she never does when patients go home to “loving families, people I know will be kind and gentle.” Again, curiously, she tells Peter afterward, that Miss Lansdowne is, “I’m sure, devoted to Pietro.” Down in Florida, however, it isn’t long before Pietro runs away: He climbs into a car idling by his house and is unceremoniously dumped out by the road when he is discovered, then found by a poor family and taken in as “a Wop kid” abandoned by “fruit tramps.” When Peter hears that Pietro is missing, he uses his stardom to get the boy’s picture—as well as the news that he is Pietro’s father, which Miss Lansdowne immediately publicly affirms, nullifying Peter’s original concerns that he would never obtain custody of Pietro if he just asked—plastered on every front page in the country. Pietro is found shortly, and goes off with Peter to Idaho for a month while Peter films a movie.

The Petes, junior and senior, visit Melinda when they return from location, and something terrible has happened: In a few short weeks, Pietro is now “a spoiled, self-satisfied, arrogant little boy.” Now Melinda is Miss Lansdowne’s biggest fan: “It does seem a shame for you to tear down in three weeks all that Miss Lansdowne did in five years, to make him into a charming, well-behaved little boy,” she tells Peter. She goes on an outing with them, and decides never to see them again: “I’m fond of Pietro—that is, I was! But the kind of little boy he is now—no, thanks!” I can hardly believe this is the same woman who defended the brats on her ward in Chapter 1. She and Peter have a huge fight about child-rearing, but it’s side-tracked when she admits that she is in love with Peter, after all—did anyone else see that coming?—but can’t marry him because “I wouldn’t stand by and see you turn Pietro into a mean, nasty, spoiled brat—not after Miss Lansdowne did such a fine job.” Really? Instead of agreeing that Melinda’s admittedly sound ideas about discipline are correct, Peter wakes Pietro up and uses the boy—as he refused to do for his publicity shots in the beginning of the book—to convince Melinda to marry him. She melts, and now the three are a happy family, and all is right with the world.

As I have adopted the cover illustration on this book for my own blog’s banner, I had a lot invested in this book. And initially, when Melinda is a spunky, spirited, right-minded gal and her fellow nurses are witty and sharp, I was very pleased with it. The writing also has fine moments, such as, “Melinda made a flying clutch at her self-control and only just managed to catch it.” But the story becomes overly bogged down with Peter’s backstory (we are also treated to the tragic saga of how he ended up a famous singer, the poor thing, which I have mercifully spared you) and the lengthy search for Pietro. Furthermore, Melinda’s total about-face on showing affection to all children and her opinion of Miss Lansdowne is bewildering and annoying. The plot has more holes than a colander, and we’re left with the impression that getting married is somehow going to solve Peter and Melinda’s disagreements over Pietro’s upbringing. Furthermore, the issue of how Melinda is going to respond to being cast into the enormous spotlight of fame that Peter lives in (screaming mobs of girls literally claw him when he goes out in public), when she has strenuously objected to it all through the book, remains unaddressed as well. If author Peggy Gaddis had finished the book in the same vein in which she started it, I would be mighty pleased; as it ends, I am not.

Palm Beach Nurse

By Peggy Gaddis,©1953

Julia Blake was not only a very good nurse and an extremely attractive woman but, most important, people trusted and confided in her. And so she knew:

Why Joseph Smith, her patient and a promising violinist, was brutally beaten but not quite murdered

Why Alice Jerome, who was not only rich but kind, brought Joseph to America from his native Italy

Why Isobel Cartwright, the young, beautiful heir to Miss Jerome’s fortune pretended to be in love with Joseph

And it was certainly because of her warmth and sincerity that Kent Harper, Miss Jerome’s lawyer and advisor, was deeply in love with Julia, but sometimes not as attentive as she would have liked. Julia finds her job in Palm Beach the most exciting one she has ever had … one which combines the challenge of nursing with mystery and romance.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Julia’s crisp white uniform was very becoming, and the perky cap that crowned her crisp, shining hair was tilted at exactly the correct angle for a smart, efficient and very pretty registered nurse.”

“As much as she could see of his face, beneath the bandages about his head, she liked.”

“No fancy dress designer in the world had ever been able to dream up a costume as becoming as a nurse’s uniform.”

“It always amuses me that men are so sure that the sole purpose of a girl’s life is to find some hapless male to pay her bills and keep a roof over her head. No matter what her profession is, or how happy she may be in it, or how successful, she’s supposed to be only ‘marking time’ until a man she can snare comes along.”

“I yearn to turn her across my knee with the business end of a slipper in my strong right hand!”

“The three things that make life worth living are, first of all, someone to love; something to hope for; and last but terribly important, something to do.”

“It’s the sort of life I want, too. A small white house, a garden, a tree or two, a sand-box for the kids. Me with a job, coming home late in the afternoon to find you waiting for me at the gate.”

REVIEW:

Julia Blake has traveled to Palm Beach in the customary VNRN fashion: One of her patients in her Atlanta hospital needed a nurse to accompany her home and stay with her, and Julia took the job. But that patient is well now, so she accepted an assignment as a special at the hospital—“very, very special indeed, if I may say so,” says the patient’s doctor when he sees her—a young man who was beaten and is now in a coma. On her first day, she walks into the patient’s room to find three people there, despite the no visitors sign posted on the door. So she throws them out—and then discovers that the older woman is Alice Jerome, one of the hospital’s major benefactors.

Miss Jerome has asked to see Julia at her home, and Julia is obliged to put her head in the lion’s mouth—but when she arrives at Miss Jerome’s beachfront villa, Miss Jerome doesn’t decapitate her, she hires Julia to care for the patient when he is well enough to return to Miss Jerome’s home, and installs her in the large suite upstairs with views of the ocean. The patient—an Italian named, strangely, Joseph Smith—is a violinist whom Miss Julia brought home with her from the Continent last year, and she is intent on training him to become a world-class musician, apparently purely out of the goodness of her heart.

Also out of the goodness of her heart, Miss Jerome has raised Isobel Cartwright from infancy, giving the girl everything she wants. Unfortunately, Isobel has not responded with the same gratitude that Joseph shows, and instead displays her true colors by marching into Julia’s room without knocking and telling Julia, “You are to leave my men alone.” This means not just Joseph but also Kent Harper, Miss Jerome’s 30-year-old attorney, who was in the party that Julia ejected from Joseph’s hospital room. Isobel goes on to explain to Julia that she really has a thing for Kent, but is engaged to Joseph on the off-chance that Miss Jerome decides to leave him a lot of money when she dies—which is bound to be soon, because she’s really old and besides, this is a Peggy Gaddis VNRN—so she will have claim to it, since all that money rightfully belongs to her.

Kent, however, has other ideas, which occur to him almost immediately upon clapping eyes on the beautiful Julia in her breathtaking nylon uniform. He takes her out on dates and kisses her—then abruptly stops asking her out, telling her that he loves her and wants to marry her, but he can’t see her for now: “Wait until I can explain a lot of things that you are going to feel need explanations. Will you trust me, darling?” This is not the only mystery Julia grapples with, but the only one she is unsuccessful at solving. The two other main mysteries in this book, i.e. why Miss Jerome is so devoted to Joseph, and why was Joseph beaten up, are soon explained away, when the person who knows the answer decides out of the blue to unburden themselves to Julia. She should have considered a career as a police detective. But she shouldn’t feel too badly about the one answer that got away, as in fact the reader never gets any explanation for this, either.

Joseph, it turns out, is the grandson of a man whom Miss Jerome fell in love with as a young girl, but since the man was merely a violin teacher, and Italian to boot, her family not only rejected the match but drove the man out of the United States. Miss Jerome had tracked down the young Joseph, the last remaining descendent of her true love, and ensconced him at her house, but her attentions to him are ironically his undoing, as they brought him to the notice of an Italian syndicate. His attackers are desperately trying to bring an Italian woman named Vera into the United States. They believe that if Joseph tells Miss Jerome he wants to marry Vera, Miss Jerome, with her money and power, will get Vera into the states without an extensive background check, which would apparently reveal Vera as a bad seed. But Joseph, who cannot betray Miss Jerome, refuses to do this. Unfortunately, he has a weak spot: He’s afraid that the gang will discover that he’s in love with this woman in Italy, Lucia, and that the gang will harm her in some way.

It’s a lot of back story, but eventually we get some action: One night, Julia hears a noise from Joseph’s room, and enters to see a man bending over Joseph with a knife. She screams, the man runs off, and the entire house turns up in his bedroom. She’s a bit embarrassed that all she could manage in this moment of crisis was a shriek: “What a terrible way for a nurse to behave,” she says. When she tells everyone what she saw, Joseph looks them all in the eye and tells them that Julia was dreaming and that there was no man. Finally she gets the hint and agrees she was dreaming, though Kent isn’t buying it. He posts a guard outside Joseph’s windows—and Julia’s, lest the man she saw come back for her, too—but one night Joseph is able to give the guards the slip and escape the house. His body is found on the beach the next morning—and his suicide note is on his pillow, and a scrap of paper with Lucia’s name and address on it is under Julia’s pillow.

His reason for doing himself in, apparently, is to prevent the bad guys from finding Lucia, which is what Julia tells Miss Jerome in an attempt to console her when Joseph’s death leaves her prostrate with grief. Julia wants to track down Lucia in Italy to help her—what this help might be remains unclear—but if she goes racing off to Italy, the bad guys will follow her and find Lucia, and maybe wreak some vengeance. She needs a cover, and what better excuse for her to go to Italy, Miss Jerome decides, than to go on a honeymoon? So two days later, Julia finds herself marrying Kent in Miss Jerome’s bedroom. Isobel is late for the ceremony, and shows up just as the happy bride and groom are kissing—and stomps up to Julia and slaps her to the ground. This is just too much for Miss Jerome, who promptly expires.

But Miss Jerome has one last secret—and you’ll never guess what’s coming—Isobel has been written out of the will, and the estate (after generous legacies to the devoted staff) is to be divided between Kent and Julia. In the meantime, Kent and Julia spend a lot of time discussing, in public places and with numerous people, their top secret mission to find Lucia and prevent the bad guys from discovering her as well. Though we never actually find out how that goes, my guess is that Lucia is doomed.

On the whole, this was a fun and enjoyable book. There is a good amount of camp, and the characters, though straight out of the usual Peggy Gaddis playbook, are entertaining, and for once the ungrateful young rich girl doesn’t see the light, so that was something new. Julia is feisty, competent, and likable, though I was disappointed by her abrupt change in attitude once she has a ring on her finger. She early on declares that she would never give up her job for a man—and after she and Kent marry, they decide she will keep working “until the babies start coming, anyway”—but all the independent spirit she possesses at the beginning of the book is tossed away with the wedding bouquet and she says, “Honestly, Kent, it’s going to be your job to make important decisions. I’d like anything that you’d like. It’s always going to be like that.” After Kent and Julia are married, the book spends about 30 pages treading water as everyone waits for the will to be read, squandering the liveliness it’s had up to this point and slowly fizzling out. It doesn’t pay to look too hard at some of the details of the book—would the mob think that the best way to get Vera into the U.S. is to have Joseph marry her? would Joseph really leave Lucia’s address behind if he’s killing himself to protect her?—but this is, after all, just a silly nurse novel, and in the end it’s still better than most.