The Night Shift

Some nights, the most dangerous person in the room is the one who's smiling.

For eleven years, nurse Frances Doyle has worked the night shift at Saint Aldwin's, a fifteen-bed critical-access hospital clinging to the side of a mountain sixty-one miles from anywhere that matters. She likes it out here. No resident to page, no attending to overrule her, just a chart, a pair of hands, and whatever Frankie decides. It's how she survives—quiet, careful, and enough. Never one inch more than enough. Not since the night she stayed silent and a man paid for it with his life.

Then an ice storm seals the pass. The plows come off the grade. The phones begin to fail. And a volunteer rig backs into the bay carrying a terrified eight-year-old boy—the lone survivor of a wreck that killed his father—and a county sheriff's deputy who rode in beside him. The deputy is calm. Helpful. He stands exactly where he should. He spreads the calm around a room in crisis the way good men do.

He is also lying.

Frankie reads people by their hands, and something about this man doesn't add up. But the nearest help is an hour of glass road away, the badge on his chest demands the same deference she once gave a doctor's word, and a wounded child is watching her decide whether to believe him. She has until dawn to figure out what Deputy Russ Cobb really wants—and to make sure the wrong person doesn't get to choose who lives and who dies. This time, staying silent isn't survival. It's surrender.

Taut, claustrophobic, and impossible to put down, The Night Shift unfolds across a single unforgettable night, where every locked door and dead radio spot becomes a weapon, and the quiet was only ever the storm catching its breath.

Turn the page and clock in. The night shift has only just begun.