Happy Mystery Month! UNP is celebrating the start of the month by sharing the opening lines from Bison Books’ editions of Mignon G. Eberhart’s novels.

Eberhart was Nebraska’s own Grand Master of mystery; the iconic Bison Books editions of her work have returned to print for a limited-time to celebrate the selection of The Mystery of Hunting’s End as the One Book One Nebraska pick of 2023. Grab the full set!

Mignon G. Eberhart had a long career that brought her the Grand Masters Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America. She died at the age of ninety-seven in 1996.

The Mystery of Hunting’s End (Bison Books, 1998)

“It was, I am sure, the most extraordinarily desolate place I had ever seen in all my life. It did not seem possible that twelve hours from Barrington, from midnight until noon of the next day exactly, could bring me so far, apparently from the haunts of man; from a crowded, pavemented, humming city into a region so wild, so strange, so morose in its barren reaches of sand and pine-dotted buttes and somber emptiness.”

While the Patient Slept (Bison Books, 1995)

“Twice, possibly, I had had occasion to travel the rather deserted and out-of-the-way road along which the old Federie house looms desolately magnificent amid the somber clusters of evergreens that surround it. At any rate, I recognized the place at my first glimpse of it through the fog, knowing that I had seen it at some previous time, though, until I arrived there that cold February day to nurse old Mr. Federie himself, I did not know even the name of the family that owned it.”

Wolf in Man’s Clothing (Bison Books, 1996)

“Anna Haub opened the door, and at the same time, for me, opened the door upon murder. Naturally, I didn’t know that and take to my heels.”

The House on the Roof (Bison Books, 1996)

“The woman’s eyes slid toward the door again, and Deborah very much wished she hadn’t come.”

From This Dark Stairway (Bison Books, 1996)

“The stairway stretched before me, the smooth rail shining darkly, the broad steps losing themselves in shadows and then emerging again at the top of the flight into the pale little area of green-shaded light about the chart desk. It is an old stairway, its steps shallow and very wide and covered so securely with some kind of rubber-like fabric that one’s steps only make soft little thuds of sound upon it, and it begins at the first floor of the Melady Memorial Hospital in a splendor of carved walnut newel posts and leads solidly upward, turning abruptly but in a dignified fashion around landings, which are midway each flight of stairs, and around the intersecting corridors of each floor all the way to the fourth and last floor. Thus, climbing the old stairway gives on a sort of cross-section of the entire hospital; all along its turns one is offered vivid glimpses of the hushed but stirring life of the place—it is like putting a finger on the pulse of the seething, intensely engrossing entity which is our hospital world.”

Death in the Fog (Bison Books, 1996)

“Charlotte Weinberg sat listening. There was, she realized, nothing to hear.”