Working Fire by Emily Bleeker

Working Fire starts off with every EMTs worst nightmare: running a call on your own family member. Ellie’s dropped out of med school and moved back to her hometown to help her sister, Amelia, take care of their dad, who’s had a stroke. Even though Broadlands is the last place she wants to be, things seem to be going alright for Ellie – she likes working as a medic and just got engaged to her boyfriend. Then there’s a shootout, and both her sister and her brother-in-law have been hit. Ellie is first on scene, and the prime suspect is none other than Amelia’s high school boyfriend, who just happens to be her fiancee’s brother. Such is life in a small town.

Told in alternating timelines, Emily Bleeker works the case forward and also show glimpses of the past couple of months and what (might have) led to the shooting. While it seems hard to find a domestic suspense novel that’s told start to finish these days, it does work well in this scenario once you get past the first few chapters. Bleeker gets your adrenaline pumping with the first response scenes, but then lets you catch a breath and go back to the family’s mostly jovial domestic life. It’s a little disconcerting at first, but eventually the timelines meld and the pace picks up continuously. A solid effort and worthy read.

A Stranger in the House by Shari Lapena

While I didn't think Shari Lapena's last book, The Couple Next Door, was ah-mazing, it wasn't bad either, and I enjoyed it on the whole. I guess the same can be said about her latest release, A Stranger in the House. In fact, I could say exactly what I said in my review of Couple and still have it hold true: "After so many good books with unreliable first person narrators, to have the whole thing done in the third person ends up feeling cold and unpersonable." (me, a year ago)

It starts off with a car accident, and the woman who was driving the car, Karen, can't remember what led up to it, but she was driving frantically in a "bad" area of town. And there just happens to be a dead body near the scene of where Karen had her accident. Was she fleeing the scene? Did she kill someone? And why does she have no past before the few years she's spent with her husband, Tom. As the police start to connect the dots, her obsessed neighbor begins inserting herself into the situation, and, as they say, the plot thickens. Read this on the beach, by the pool, or whenever you want a distracting but not too captivating read, and expect a now "classic" Lapena twist at the end.

Girl in Snow by Danya Kukafka

A fifteen-year-old girl is dead, found lying in the snow one cold February morning, and a suburban Colorado town is turned upside down. One by one, members of the community are suspected of killing Lucinda: was it the janitor that found her, the weird boy who was stalking her, her ex-boyfriend, the list goes on… Told from the perspectives of that weird stalker, Cameron, another teenage girl, Jade, who saw Cameron outside Lucinda’s house that night and is carrying a torch for the aforementioned ex, and a middling police officer, Russ, who so happens to be the former partner of Cameron’s dad, before he committed a crime and disappeared. It’s a small town, obviously. While dead “girls” are a dime a dozen these days, in A Girl in Snow, the dead girl is more of an afterthought. We don’t really get to know her, and what we do see doesn’t leave much of an impression. Instead, it’s all about the three narrators, and, in a nutshell, how messed up they are.

Cameron is deeply affected by his dad's disappearance, and while he might have had some type of personality disorder regardless, his troubles manifest themselves in weird ways, like killing pet birds and standing outside people's houses at night. Jade is psychically and emotionally abused by her alcoholic mother, but seems to be holding it together better than anyone else, except for when it comes to her childhood best friend, Zap, who ditched her for Lucinda and popularity. Then there is Russ, who is going through the motions of life without much feeling, as he's chosen to bottle up his deepest desires. Danya Kukafka does an amazing job of exploring their pasts and current motivations, and while the final reveal was perhaps a little obvious, this didn’t bother me so much, as I was more intrigued by the strength of the writing and the characters. Some reviewers seem confused by this book, because most of the characters are teenagers but it is more maturely written and also quite lyrical. Is it YA, literature, or a thriller? Who cares! It’s truly great.