Donald Geary, a freelance copywriter on a failed business trip, pockets a flash drive left in a hotel bar by a talkative stranger. Compelled by the drive’s mysterious contents and a sense his own career is at a dead end, Geary changes his travel plans to return the item personally. What begins as curiosity, however, leads to a case of mistaken identity, and Geary finds himself forced to continue playing a new role—against his will. He is soon caught in an escalating game of cat and mouse that ensnares family and friends as it moves from Washington to Oregon, through misted city streets and lonely forest roads.

“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. Sympathetic to the man she loves, she feels the same desire to find a dynamic next chapter in her life, while still deeply committed to being a responsible parent. She also knows that men discouraged by the repetitions of work and family life are “far from the only people who think life overpromised and underdelivered.”

Traversing the Pacific Northwest, from the cold height of Seattle’s 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 only live once, we do so while imagining innumerable other lives.

PREORDER NOW (Available October 2025)

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Series: Propeller Contemporary Fiction
ISBN: 9781955593137
Publication Date: October 21, 2025
Hardcover, 5.5 x 8.25 in.