Works

The Advocate and the Pussytoe Fields

Some people bury the past.

The Advocate and the Pussytoe Fields is a literary crime novel about the collapse of faith — not faith in God, but faith in the systems we built to protect the innocent.

Evelyn Beckmann is a pediatric ICU nurse in north Idaho and a newly trained child advocate. She has spent twenty-six years watching the machinery work exactly as designed: a doctor believes a fall on ice, a nurse writes down a laundry basket, a file closes in one state and never opens in the next.

Then a ten-year-old boy arrives carrying injuries that tell a different story than the adults around him, and Evelyn is the only person in the room who says so out loud.

What she finds is bigger than one child. Closed cases. Incomplete records. Good people doing their jobs. Systems built to protect children — and a man who understands exactly how to live inside them.

What happens when compassion is no longer enough, and every lawful road to protecting a child has already closed?

This is not a story about a hero. It is a moral tragedy about a woman who can no longer look away, and about what she is willing to become because of it.

Genre

Literary crime, in the tradition of Gillian Flynn, Dennis Lehane and Cormac McCarthy

Series

Book one of two

Status

Forthcoming — no publication date is set yet

Set in the Inland Northwest, the novel names real places, because that is where it happens. Every patient, every staff member, every family and every event in it is invented.

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