Double Standard

Donald Geary, a freelance copywriter on a failed business trip, pockets a flash drive left in a hotel bar. Compelled by the drive's mysterious contents and a sense his career has stalled out, Geary changes his travel plans in order to return the item personally. What begins as curiosity, however, leads to mistaken identity, and he soon finds himself caught in an escalating game of cat and mouse that ensnares family and friends as it winds its way through the city streets and forest roads of the Pacific Northwest.

"It has always been important to you to do good work. Is that what you're doing?"

This question hangs over many of the novel's characters, and is faced most acutely by Leah, Geary's longtime partner. She feels the same desire to find a meaningful next chapter in life, while still committed to her role as a parent. And she knows that men discouraged by the repetitions of work and family life are far from the only people searching for meaning in twenty-first century America.

Moving from the cold height of the Space Needle to the rocky surf of the Oregon coast, Double Standard weaves a fast-paced thriller into a novel of treachery and surveillance, the limits of identity, and the maddening fact that though we live just once, we do so while imagining innumerable possible lives.