A surprising rival and an unexpected mystery force Edna Brayley to choose between two suitors.

“Beautiful and brilliant,” the hospital staff called Edna Brayley. The lovely young nurse knew how to cope with any situation at Farmington General Hospital.

But Edna’s personal life was a different story. Upset at her father’s recent death and pressured by a young and beautiful stepmother, Edna was undecided about marrying the handsome son of a Boston millionaire. And then Edna met the compelling and embittered young doctor who had just joined the staff — and found her own stepmother a sudden rival!

The drama and conflict of a small New England hospital become part of the agonizing decision facing a young nurse and the men who love her.

Blonde Donna Mitchell decided that one way to determine her true feelings for doctor friend Richard was to change her nursing job and get a fresh slant on her emotions. After she applied at an agency for private-duty work, she was sent to the home of an eccentric importer, Mr. Eastman, who informed her that her task would not be easy. But Donna was intrigued with the challenge of this position, and also with dark-haired Steve Chandler, Mr. Eastman’s accountant and business advisor, and so she accepted with alacrity.

Mr. Eastman was planning a sea voyage to Istanbul, where he could conduct some business transactions, and naturally Donna would accompany him, along with Steve and Penelope Winslow, Mr. Eastman’s private secretary and old friend. Events whirled by at such a fast clip that before long, Istanbul was a visual reality, a city pulsating with danger and excitement heretofore undreamed of by Donna. The basis for the trip seemed to center around the purchase of the Green Medallion, a rare and precious gem, and soon Donna realized that her employer was involved in something highly illegal.

But what about Steve? Was he, too, involved, or was he merely an innocent bystander? And when a letter arrives from Richard, Donna is forced to analyze her feelings once more.

The lonely Maine seacoast town of Hawkesbury was very different from the big Boston hospital where Mavis Eaton had been serving as a nurse. Yet it was giving her an undreamed of opportunity to indulge her second talent — painting — for a whole year without interruption. In fact, the elderly patient who had offered to subsidize Mavis had made concentration on her art for twelve months one of the conditions of the grant. And when she died at the start of the experiment, Mavis found that her will still took care of the situation.

So the nurse settled down to her seascapes and landscapes. Unfortunately, some sinister developments concerning suspected spies and other unhealthy characters soon diverted Mavis and made the preservation of her own life her chief preoccupation.

Handsome, debonair Dr. Felipe Santoras was almost too good to be true. But his fiancee, Nurse Susan Smith, never questioned anything about him until he suddenly left her just before their wedding.

Shocked and heartbroken Susan impulsively quit her hospital job and followed him to his family home near Las Palmas, hoping to learn why he had jilted her. But instead of finding answers, Susan only found more questions: Why hadn’t Felipe told her how wealthy he was? Why was he always running off on mysterious trips? And why did Felipe’s brother Noe seem to dislike Susan when she — without wanting to — found him more and more attractive?

A million girls wanted the man who wanted her.

“I want you, Luv,” said Lee Watson. He was the star of The Tree of Life, the top rock group in England and America, and he lay in a hospital bed, victim of a crippling motorcycle accident. In pain and despair he had clung to Nurse Holly Brooks. Now he was going back to London to resume his career. “I love you, Holly,” he told her. “Come with me.”

And Holly came because he needed her…stepping, unaware, into a frenzied, psychedelic landscape where The Tree of Life flourished, and she was a stranger.