First Do No Harm

This first novel in the book series introduces A. Turk’s fictitious alter ego attorney Benjamin Abraham Davis, whose initials “BAD” reflect his brass persona in the courtroom. Davis, a New Yorker, travels south to attend Vanderbilt law school and is immediately taken under the wing of Morty Steine, a nationally known trial lawyer. The older lawyer mentors Davis and the unique relationship between these two men evolve, one of love and respect.

Parthenon in Nashville.

Davis’s niece, Sammie Davis, a recent paralegal graduate joins Steine & Davis. Under her uncle’s watchful eye, Sammie undergoes a metamorphosis into a responsible member of the Davis team.

First Do No Harm opens in 1992 and finds Davis taking on ten medical malpractice cases against the same two doctors and a rural community hospital in Plainview, Tennessee. The lawsuits are filed in Plainview, where the patients were injured and the hospital is the largest employer. Davis, like Joe Pesci in My Cousin Vinny, is out of his element when faced with the prejudices of a local judge and small-town politics.

Statue of Athena- Goddess of Wisdom.

Davis, with the help of a courageous outcast local doctor and despite a lazy co-counsel, secures the cases and begins the discovery process. After underestimating the huge risks involved in accepting ten medical malpractice cases at one time, Davis uncovers that the hospital and several of its personnel, including doctors, had conspired to provide unnecessary tests and surgeries on innocent patients…for years.

With small-town physicians pushing all the ethical and legal boundaries, Davis decides he has no alternative but to protect an entire community and quickly finds himself caught up in a high-stakes courtroom drama. Davis never imagined that his seemingly simple decision to right a wrong would risk his legal career, marriage, financial security, and personal safety.