THE STANDARD

The patient went home believing he was well. Four days later he was dead.

Miki Brooks is a pre-med student working nights as an orderly at Mid Plains Central, a teaching hospital where information belongs to certain people and an orderly with a linen cart is not among them. She watches anyway. She watches Dr. Myra Carpenter most of all, the best surgeon in the building and the most rigid. Miki thinks the rigidity is a flaw. It is a scar.

Then Randol Jones has a routine procedure and it goes exactly as planned. The device performed as designed. The surgeon did everything the protocol required. The lawsuit asks who wrote that protocol and who got paid for it. Miki starts pulling the thread, and the man at the other end controls her future in medicine.

The Standard is Book 5 in the Avery Cross Series, legal fiction built on real cases. It is based on Helling v. Carey, the 1974 decision in which the Supreme Court of Washington held that a profession cannot set its standard of care so low that it fails to protect the people in its care. Each novella stands alone. Each ends with a note on the real case.