The Advocate
The Advocate and the Pussytoe Fields
A novel in progress by Terry Marquardt.
Some people bury the past.
A pediatric nurse reads a child’s injuries correctly. Then she finds out what it costs to be the only one who did.
The Advocate is set in the Inland Northwest and names real places, because that is where it happens. Every patient, every staff member, every family and every event in it is invented.
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.
At the center of the novel is a question: 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.
Literary crime, in the tradition of Gillian Flynn, Dennis Lehane and Cormac McCarthy. The first of two books.
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