The Complication

Dr. Noa Reyes-Kim has spent eight years writing down every mistake the hospital's own records refuse to count. Then four of her patients die the same way, on the same morning, and the hospital's dashboard tells her nothing happened at all.

Noa is a trauma surgeon at Meridian General, the kind of doctor who checks her own sutures twice and keeps a private notebook, in ink, of every complication and near-miss the hospital's polished quality metrics have a habit of losing. When four post-operative patients suffer the same rare cardiac event within six months, Meridian's safety dashboard shows four green dots in a green field, below benchmark, expected. Noa's notebook says something else entirely.

Getting anyone to look past the dashboard means going up against a hospital built to reassure rather than investigate, starting with a CMO who would rather send her to a peer counselor than reopen four closed cases. Somewhere between the operating room and a hospital data system that cannot count to four, Noa has to decide how far she is willing to go for patients the institution has already written off as acceptable losses.

She has a scalpel, a notebook nobody can edit, and a growing certainty that the fifth patient is only a matter of time.

The Complication is Book One in The Meridian General Thrillers, a series of medical thrillers about the doctors who keep the truth the institution can't afford to see.

Perfect for readers of Robin Cook and Tess Gerritsen, and anyone who likes a thriller where the real danger wears a badge instead of a mask.