Synopsis

A new nurse at America’s famous cancer-cure hospital becomes caught in one of the Ozarks’ greatest scams in this mystery based on a true story set in 1939.

After her father’s death, nurse Della King is on the brink of homelessness—until she lands a job at the prestigious Baker Hospital in Eureka Springs, Arkansas. What promises safety and purpose—for both Della and the terminally ill patients who come from across the country—hides a far darker reality. When her beloved patients begin to die, Della must confront her deepest fears and navigate a web of secrets that tests her loyalty, courage, and sense of self.

Torn between survival and doing what is right, she risks everything to uncover the truth. The Nurse at Baker Hospital is a gripping tale of mystery, hidden histories, and self-discovery, exploring what it takes to find one’s place in a dangerous, unpredictable world.

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This book will be released on 10/6/26.

Praise

“Cullity’s immersive and richly-detailed novel brings the fascinating story of the real Baker Hospital to life through Della, a young nurse who begins to suspect all is not as it seems beneath the
perfect veneer of the hospital and its charismatic founder. Suspenseful, engrossing, and beautifully crafted, this historical tale evokes deeply relevant parallels to dangers that persist in the wellness industry today. An absolute must-read.” —Laura McHugh, author of The Weight of Blood and What’s Done in Darkness

“An engrossing story that exposes past medical fraud at an astonishing level.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Using the factual Baker Hospital in Eureka Springs to present a fictional collision between innocence and corruption, Cullity has created a swiftly-moving, thought-provoking, deeply-researched narrative with chilling relevance to our own times.” —Keith J. Scales, author of House of a Hundred Rooms

Excerpt

October, 1939

The wind swept up the yellow dust and grit on Twelfth Street in Kansas City. Della King threw out the things she couldn’t take with her—her father’s threadbare sheets and his cookie tin lunchbox, jars of kitchen grease, scraps of shopping bags they’d used for paper. Upstairs, she opened the window wider to rid the tiny apartment of its stale air, the smell of sickness and death, and brushed away the dead spiders that hung inside the panes.

At the train station, Della passed the tanks to be filled with spring water at Eureka Springs, Arkansas, and climbed the steps into one of the passenger cars. She found an empty seat among the families carrying picnic baskets, and put her hat box and small suitcase on the luggage rack above her.

Outside the train window, a poster on the platform advertised a change in Thanksgiving from the last Thursday of the month to the second last Thursday. Two blue-eyed, blond-haired children sat at a table, their beaming parents behind them. Sliced turkey, thick gravy, and mashed potatoes steamed on their plates, along with cranberry sauce, stuffing, and hunks of bread topped with melting butter. Della turned away. Nothing she knew. No one was advertising the pancakes and dandelion greens she’d made for her sick father on special occasions, not the collard greens that had kept them from hunger.

The train jolted and scraped out of the station. In the early morning light, the city was quiet. As the morning passed, the brown prairie soil made way for lime-green uplands where bluestem grasses whispered beside mineral springs. The sun spilled across the fields, her new nursing job at Baker Hospital a beacon before her. The train gathered speed, moving past dusty farms and streams choked with gravel as they traveled deeper into the Ozarks. The landscape became barren hills and dark caves. Turkey buzzards coasted on warm currents, a silver sheen on the edge of their wings, waiting for death in the valleys below. The train stopped at clapboard towns. With the change in scenery, the passengers by late afternoon shifted from families with picnic baskets to wary-looking grifters who snatched up newspapers left behind by other passengers. Della welcomed the sight of the handsome couple in silk suits and matching dark sunglasses who boarded last.

She was taking her sandwich wrapped in wax paper out of her hand-bag when the woman in sunglasses let out an indignant yell. A small crowd of passengers rushed up the narrow aisle to ask the woman what had happened. Della got up and squeezed in among them to see—the lady was rubbing her arm as she pointed out a stranger to her companion. “Daniel, he had the nerve to pinch me,” she shouted. “There’s a bruise coming already!”

About the Author

Jocelyn Cullity’s historical novel, Amah & the Silk-Winged Pigeons (Winner, Best Book Awards, 2018), was published in English by Inanna Publications (Canada) and Rupa (India), and translated into French and Tamil. The Envy of Paradise (Finalist for Multicultural Fiction, International Book Awards, 2020), was also published by Inanna Publications. Cullity is the Director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at the University of South Alabama.

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