First, Do No Harm
Oliver Adams has spent sixteen years learning what a body tells you before anyone opens their mouth — the smell of a scene that's about to go bad, the particular stillness of someone who isn't going to make it. He's held pressure on wounds while a mother screamed his name like a prayer. He's ridden in the back with the ones who didn't survive the drive. None of that prepared him for the calls that started going wrong on purpose.
It begins with a delay that shouldn't exist -an ambulance routed the long way, a patient triaged down instead of up, a death that reads, on paper, like an efficiency. Then a second. A third. Oliver Adams starts keeping his own log, the kind that isn't for the department.
What he finds isn't a glitch. It's a decision. Somewhere behind the dispatch software, in two hundredths of a second, a system is scoring who's worth saving, and who isn’t. The people who built it, sold it, and signed off on it knew exactly what it would cost, and to whom. The algorithm didn't decide this on its own; the people did, and they've been telling themselves it was efficient.
The deeper Oliver digs, the more he learns the system was never the real monster. It's just very good at hiding the ones who are.
First, Do No Harm is grounded emergency medicine written by someone who's actually done the job — the blood, the black humor, the 3 a.m. radio silence after a call that didn't end well. It's the first book in a planned series about what gets lost when human judgment is replaced by a spreadsheet, and what kind of person is willing to make that trade.