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.

When I'm Gone and Wreckage by Emily Bleeker

This past month month I've read two titles by Emily Bleeker: her first novel, Wreckage, and her latest release, When I'm Gone. I'll start with Wreckage, a stranded-on-a-desert-island tale. Lillian and her mother-in-law, Margaret, are on a private plane that goes down in Fiji, along with the pilot and flight attendant, and a corporate exec, Dave. Not all survive the crash, nor the nearly two years until they are rescued. We learn from the start that at least Lillian and Dave are still around, but there are a lot of questions about the survivors' time on the island and what may, or may not, have happened.

Lillian tries to answer some of those questions in an on-air interview with a particularly nasty reporter, and the story slowly but energetically unfolds throughout. The "twists" might be a little obvious at times, but you're never bored waiting to find out the truth, and you might find yourself imagining what you would do in a similar situation.  I really enjoyed this book!

Now on to book two, When I'm Gone. Natalie Richardson dies from a rare form a cancer, leaving her husband, Luke, alone with their three children and a lot of heartache. Right after her funeral he begins to get letters from her, which she started writing after her initial diagnosis and throughout the course of her treatment and short-lived recovery. The letters are heart-wrenching, and I dare you to get through the first part of the book without a box of tissues. Knowing this was going to be overly sentimental, I was curious to see if there was more to the story than the initial premise, and indeed there was a lot more. (One could say too much more?)

Luke starts to search from whoever is sending the letters to him, and then his oldest son seems to think he may have been adopted, which leads Luke to searching around in his wife's past. I can't say much more without divulging all the twists in this story, but I can say that half the fun is finding them all out, because there are so many of them, and they get more and more implausible as the story goes along. Part of me wishes she had gotten off one stop sooner on the "everyone is connected" train. Throw in a new love interest for Luke, her jealous and abusive husband, false drugs charges against him, and a road trip where he visits the sad realities of his own past, and the second half of this book is a wild ride.

It's hard not to compare the two books, since I read them back to back, but if I were to pick one of these to read again then it would certainly be Wreckage, and I'll be looking forward to seeing whatever she comes up with next.