What the Brushes Missed

About this book

In October 2015, Marisol Teague scrubs hospital endoscopes in the basement of St. Brendan's in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a care no one upstairs notices. She is forty-six, dyslexic, bad-hipped and good at her job, which is exactly why two patients' deaths from a drug-resistant infection unsettle her: she did everything the manual said. Thirty years earlier, in the same room, her mother Ruth signed a sterilizer log on a Friday night and was blamed when a patient died. Now, as a merger tightens the hospital's grip on its numbers, Marisol must decide whether to say what she suspects about the instrument, and whether the truth is worth what it will cost the people she loves.