num_pages: 228
description: Long before Stephen King's Annie Wilkes terrorized readers and moviegoers in Misery, Dell Shannon created the unsettling practical nurse Josephine Slaney. In the quiet suburb of Santa Monica in 1963, eighty-eight-year-old Mabel Foster loses her husband to a stroke. Faced with the unhappy prospect of Mrs. Foster having to sell her house and move into a retirement home, her neighbors hire Josephine Slaney to take care of her. At first the immense nurse seems like a godsend - perhaps a bit over-friendly, but the cost of her help is a bargain. Soon it becomes clear, however, that all is not right with Josephine. Mrs. Foster, once bright and alert, falls into torpor much too rapidly for it to be explained away as onrushing senility. As neighbors gossip about Mrs. Foster's daily retreat into quiet seclusion at the request of Josephine, one neighbor, the feisty twenty-seven-year-old Brenda Sheldon, unofficially notifies the police. It is up to detective Dan Valentine to uncover the strange, lethal pattern among Josephine's former patients, and the race is on to stop her before she can strike again.
language: English
title: Sorrow to the Grave
titlecomplete: Sorrow to the Grave
genres: Mystery
ratings_count: 17
publisher: Morrow