J. Stephen Funk wasn’t always an author, though his second career was inspired by his first. He spent 48 years as a trial attorney in King County.

After retirement, he decided not to relax or travel, but to start a new hobby — telling stories and writing. Recently, he self-published a novel inspired by one of his cases.

In the mid ’70s, a prospective client visited Funk’s office and told him a heartbreaking story about his young wife’s death. She had given birth and was experiencing residual bleeding, and her doctor prescribed a drug that didn’t help.

“The nurses charted her decline over a couple hours until it was down to nothing, down to the last drop of blood,” he said.

Island Books will host a reading from 3-4 p.m. July 17 for Funk’s “The Last Drop of Blood,” a legal and medical mystery about the negligent doctor and the “conspiracy of silence” that protected him.

Funk was able to research the case through hospital records, which he said were later altered. Due to the “conspiracy of silence” surrounding medical malpractice, the facts were difficult to prove, but in the end, Funk “provided an orphaned child just legal compensation for the loss of her young and innocent mother.”

The case fascinated Funk, who, as a former medic in the Air Force Reserve, said he was “well equipped” to write about malpractice and do the necessary legal and medical research. He decided to use the case as a starting point for a fictional version of the story in which the doctor is not just lazy or careless, but a truly evil, “heartless and amoral” person who attempts to cover up the incident to maintain his respect and prominence in the community. Other characters include a relentless attorney and a courageous young nurse.

Funk participates in many writing groups around the Eastside, including a TELOS continuing education class for creative writing at Bellevue College, and a group that meets at the Mercer Island Library once a month. He resides in Bellevue with his wife of 52 years, and is close to his two children and four clever grandchildren, to whom he devotes as much of his time as he can when he’s not writing, he said.

Family is at the center of Funk’s universe, and all of the profits from his book sales go to the nonprofit organization, The Pink Daisy Project, established by his daughter, Debbie Cantwell. When Cantwell’s children were only 4 and 5, she was diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, the illness that claimed the life of her grandmother, Daisy.

Funk helped his daughter form the charity to help young mothers by giving them gift cards (through donations) for groceries, gasoline, medications and meals. It has grown to help women nationwide, and in 2011, Cantwell was nominated and became one of 10 finalists for CNN’s Heroes of the Year.

Funk said that he enjoys writing, even if not all of his work gets published. He is currently working on a collection of short stories. The self-publishing process can be challenging and expensive, but it provides Funk with an opportunity to tell stories that he can read to his grandkids, he said. He first became interested in writing when making up stories about a character called “Willy the Worm” for them.

His advice to other writers is to “assemble heroes from people you’ve known,” then “turn the characters loose and see what they do.”

“People ask me if I write an outline first, and I suppose that would be a reasonable way of doing it,” Funk said. “I find it easier to start with a problem and figure out the characters that would be involved. [In “The Last Drop of Blood”] a girl has died in the hospital, and we want some justice.”

For more, see www.jstephenfunk.com and www.pinkdaisyproject.com.

Funk said that his book is available digitally and at Island Books, University Bookstore in Bellevue and on Amazon.com.