nurses

Small Great Things is the story of Ruth Jefferson, an African American labor and delivery nurse with twenty years of experience working in hospitals on the East coast. When a couple requests that no person of color touch their baby, the hospital complies and assigns a new nurse. But later, due to an emergency, Ruth is left in the nursery by herself, and the baby goes into cardiac arrest. She hesitates before performing CPR, but there is no way to save the baby. Ruth then finds herself dismissed from her job and on trial for the death of the baby.

Ruth is represented by a white public defender

Dr. Jack Travis is trouble with a capital “T”.  He runs a free medical clinic for those who can’t afford medical care on the edges of an up and coming posh neighborhood in San Antonio. To support himself and the clinic, he works at several of the surrounding emergency rooms, including Grace Medical. Proximity to a gated community draw controversy to the clinic and Jack defends it and its patients vehemently against attempts to shut them down.

Bess Crawford, home on leave from her nursing duties in World War I France, finds a woman cowering in the cold doorway of her London flat.  Julianna has run from her abusive husband and has nowhere to turn.  At Julianna’s request Bess returns with her to Vixen Hill, the Ellis family estate in Sussex.  To say the Ellis family is dysfunctional would be an understatement.   Per the other Bess Crawford mysteries, murder ensues and Bess and family friend Simon are there to help set things right.  An interesting, if somewhat unbelievable story sends Bess back to France in search of the illegitimate

In early summer, 1917, Bess Crawford returns from the trenches in France with badly wounded patients, among them a severe burn victim who has a picture of his wife pinned to his tunic.  Bess turns her patients over to a clinic in England and boards another train to London for her few hours of leave before returning to her nursing duties in France.  She notices another woman in the crowd at the train station who seems greatly distressed while seeing off an officer who is about to board the train, and realizes it is the face in the photograph worn by the burn victim.  How strange—especially when