Dale Porterfield, M.D., is embarked on a second career at the age of thirty-six. She nears the end of that marathon known as a medical education. A requirement for her degree in Family Practice is a three-month stint in the office of a mentoring physician. She and university professor Dr. Cameron Smithson, who also serves on the State Board of Medical Supervisors, have become lovers. A rural physician, Dr. Elroy Craddock, M.D., has been charged with vaguely defined ethical violations. To both fulfill her training obligation and to aid Cameron Smithson by ferreting out specific examples of Dr. Craddock's malfeasances, she has herself assigned to his office in the northern Minnesota village of Trillium. Her own concept of ethical conduct ends up weighed on the balance scale. Differences between the measured pace of academic medicine and the sometimes frenzy of a busy rural practice overwhelm her. Patients become friends, and she discovers the personal price of such relationships when serious illness and death strike. A dash of Trillium's "Wild West" mentality involves her in unexpected hazards. She experiences the angst of any spy as she works alongside the man she is committed to betraying. In the mainstream novel, A Question of Ethics, Dr. Roger MacDonald shares his intimate knowledge of a rural medical practice. He brings the authenticity of a memoir to a work of fiction. He is the author of a mystery story, With Malice Toward All (Singing River Publications), as well as three memoirs based on forty-eight years as a rural physician: A Country Doctor's Casebook, A Country Doctor's Chronicle (Minnesota Historical Society Press), and A Country Doctor's Journal (Adventure Publications).