Vintage Golden Age Mystery
Scavenger Hunt Category: Nurse
Date Finished: June 29, 2016
TBR #59

Another Michael Shayne mystery so close on the heels of the last one, but I was trying to read them in order and get to this nurse cover, as it was the only one I had to fit that category. Here a man wakes up in a boarding house room with no memory of the last two weeks. And, as usually happens, there is a corpse next to him. What has happened in the last two weeks and did he murder this man? He turns to Michael Shayne to find out. The trail leads to some supposed friends of his who threw the going away bash that led to this, along with two dead women and a nurse who is more than she seems.

This one moves along very quickly and is a strong mystery. Shayne is back in Miami, with a side trip to Key West. Lucy Hamilton and Tim Rourke are nowhere to be seen, and may be back in Kentucky taking care of the business from A Taste for Violence. Halliday really hit his peak with these late 1940s mysteries, before getting more formulaic as he handed them over to ghostwriters.