During a night of relentless snowfall, a hospital cut off from the outside world becomes the setting of an impossible mystery: a doctor is found unconscious, a woman vanishes, and every witness reveals a different piece of the puzzle. Irene Ferb reinvents the cozy mystery with a story told as a true-crime documentary, inviting readers to uncover the truth alongside its protagonists.
A historic snowstorm leaves a hospital completely isolated from the outside world. The Intensive Care Unit becomes a small, self-contained universe where escape seems impossible. What begins as a difficult shift soon turns into a succession of extraordinary incidents: a massive fight, multiple poisonings, and recurring power outages.
Amid the chaos, Hugo, one of the ICU doctors, is found unconscious in a bathroom with a puncture wound to his neck. Shortly afterward, his fiancée Sheila vanishes without a trace. Trapped inside the hospital, doctors, nurses, healthcare assistants, police officers, and cleaning staff struggle to understand what is happening as the night grows increasingly strange.
As the testimonies of those present gradually reconstruct the events, a story emerges that stretches back many years. Hugo and Carlos were once inseparable friends and classmates in medical school until a betrayal changed their lives forever. A decision made by Hugo ultimately led to Carlos being expelled from the program while Hugo escaped unscathed. Forced to abandon the future he had envisioned, Carlos rebuilt his life as a maintenance technician at the very same hospital where Hugo now works.
When the truth finally comes to light, Carlos admits that he was the one who attacked Hugo. He had not planned to do so that night, but years of resentment resurfaced when the two men crossed paths again under extraordinary circumstances. Everything seems to fit. The mystery appears solved.
But the night is far from over.
Sheila is found dead, hidden inside the shroud of a patient who had died only hours earlier. The investigation then turns toward Emi, Carlos’s mother and a longtime member of the hospital’s cleaning staff. Like her son, she carries deep scars left by Hugo, who years earlier had made life miserable for her daughter during a relationship they once shared.
Mother and son are united by the wounds Hugo inflicted on their family. Carlos attacked Hugo. And Emi, taking advantage of the confusion and disorder surrounding the storm, decided to settle her own score with Sheila, convinced that she and Hugo were responsible for everything that had gone wrong in her family’s life. She murdered Sheila and managed to conceal the crime in plain sight.
When the snow finally stops falling, the mysteries of that extraordinary night are ultimately resolved. Yet the emotional wounds exposed by the investigation prove far harder to heal. What initially seemed like a series of impossible events is revealed to be the result of years of accumulated secrets, mistakes, and unresolved grievances. And as the hospital slowly returns to normal, those who shared that shift discover that none of them will leave it unchanged.
RELEVANT INFORMATION: Irene Ferb is the pen name of a Spanish writer and professional nurse. Her work moves between comedy, romance, and mystery, often drawing inspiration from settings and experiences connected to her professional background, bringing a deeply human and recognizable perspective to her stories.
The Longest Shift stands out for its unusual narrative structure within the mystery genre. The story takes the form of a documentary-style true crime in which the protagonists themselves recount an extraordinary night. Doctors, nurses, nursing assistants, police officers, and hospital workers reconstruct the events through their own memories and experiences, offering partial accounts, contradictions, and new perspectives that gradually allow the mystery to be pieced together.
This combination of fake documentary, ensemble mystery, and hospital setting gives the novel a distinctive narrative and visual identity, allowing suspense, humor, emotion, and human relationships to be explored from multiple viewpoints. The result is a particularly compelling property for audiovisual adaptation, positioned somewhere between a mockumentary, a locked-room mystery, and an ensemble character drama.
AUDIOVISUAL POTENTIAL: TV Series, Limited Series, Feature Film, TV Movie.
AVAILABLE LANGUAGES: Spanish.
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