Maurice Thomas

Title: Nurse Kate’s Mercy Flight
Author: Virginia K. Smiley
Publisher: Ace
Copyright: 1968
Illustrator: Maurice Thomas
Review available

Running won’t help—but I can’t go back! That was Kate’s desperate thought as she fled to Alaska, far from the New York hospital where the young nurse thought she had been fatally and tragically negligent in her duties. Here, in the land of the midnight sun, in the remote settlement where her aunt and uncle ran a bush pilot service, Kate was determined to isolate herself, to hide from love and her duty as a nurse. But she didn’t figure on the dangers the pilots faced daily—those brave cheerful young men who wanted her friendship, and needed her help. Most of all, she didn’t figure on Jeff…


The original art for this cover (left) includes a signature along the left side of her dress. This signature is very similar to that of a known Maurice Thomas work. Maurice Thomas illustrated pulp fiction covers in the early 1950s but is known to have illustrated a cover for The Fire of Love, by romance queen Barbara Cartland, in 1964 for Avon.