The Charge Nurse

At St. Mercy Regional Medical Center, Ianthe Rasmussen-Olabski is the charge nurse on the MICU, a role she has held for eight years after decades of critical-care nursing in New York City, Boston, and beyond. She knows her unit intimately: every monitor's quirk, every nurse's competence, the particular sound the ward makes when it is running safely. On a quiet September night, as she charts her rounds across twelve beds, everything changes. A patient's rhythm begins to deteriorate.
The code team arrives. And in the aftermath of what unfolds, Ianthe begins to notice something that no one else has yet recognized: a pattern that suggests one of her nurses may have deliberately harmed patients in their care. What follows is not a police procedural but an institutional reckoning, as Ianthe navigates the slow, necessary process of reporting suspicion, submitting to investigation, and watching her hospital decide whether it has the integrity to pursue the truth.
Set entirely within the walls and corridors of the hospital and the lives of its staff, The Charge Nurse is a novel about the observational work that sustains healthcare, the courage required to break silence, and the fragility of the systems we depend on to protect us when we are at our most vulnerable.