Sarah Keate

The Patient in Room 18 is a 1929 mystery novel written by Mignon G. Eberhart. Eberhart's first published novel, it follows the adventures of nurse Sarah Keate, who would later appear in six more of Eberhart's works, and became one of the most popular mystery characters of the time. The novel later served as the basis for a 1938 motion picture released by Warner Brothers, with the same title, starring Patric Knowles and Ann Sheridan. The plot is set in a hospital in an unnamed city in Nebraska in this 1929 chiller. The ethereal suspense of the unseasonably dreary weather and several suspicious characters creeping stealthily throughout the South wing, is revealed in the keen observations of our narrator, Nurse Keate.

By the end of the 1930s, Eberhart had become the leading female crime novelist in the United States and was one of the highest-paid female crime novelists in the world, next to Agatha Christie. She was one of the first of many writers called, by their publishers, "America's Agatha Christie".