Sarah Kee is a Publicity Assistant at UNP and is not an amateur detective.

In honor of National Cozy Mystery Day, I’d be remiss to not talk about a mystery writer with Nebraska ties, Mignon G. Eberhart! Her book, The Mystery of Hunting’s End, was selected as the 2023 One Book One Nebraska recipient. To celebrate, we brought five of Eberhart’s other books back into print for a limited time.

Book publishing is a fickle business; and you can’t always predict which books are going to stay in the minds of readers long after a book has been published. Eberhart, like Agatha Christie, was a wildly popular writer during the golden age of detective fiction; and yet, it’s Christie who most readers would recognize today. National Cozy Mystery Day is even celebrated on Agatha Christie’s birthday. Since I was guilty of having never heard of Eberhart before this year, I decided to go on a literary journey and read all six of the Eberhart books we had available.

Four of the books, While the Patient Slept, The Mystery of Hunting’s End, From This Dark Stairway and Wolf in Man’s Clothing, were part of her Nurse Sarah Keate series. During all of these cases, Nurse Keate not only manages to care for her sick clients, but is a shrewd amateur detective who is instrumental to solving each mystery. The other two, Death in the Fog and The House on the Roof, are stand-alone mysteries that also feature female protagonists.

If you’re unsure where to start, I recommend The Mystery of Hunting’s End. Nurse Sarah Keate accompanies detective Lance O’Leary to Hunting’s End, a weekend lodge in the Sand Hills owned by the Kingery family. Their companions are the same guests who were at the lodge when Matil Kingery’s father died of “heart failure” five years ago, and Matil intends to find out which one of them murdered him. Shut in by a November snowstorm, Sarah is recruited to help solve the mystery while caring for Matil’s Aunt Lucy. I wasn’t able to guess the killer before it was revealed, but that didn’t prevent me from enjoying the story from the comfort of my couch.

It’s also no mystery where I’ll be tonight, watching Mystery House, the 1938 movie based off The Mystery of Hunting’s End, and curled up under a blanket with a warm beverage.