With a Vengeance

This is a medical thriller set in St Louis, Missouri in 2003, and the main character is the hard-working Maggie O’Brien. She is an extremely busy person, working as a Tactical Emergency Medic for the city/county, a part-time Paramedic in Manchester, and her main job being as a Trauma Nurse at Blymore Memorial Trauma Hospital. St Louis is being overwhelmed by a biblical sized plague of cicadas, which is sending lots of its residents a bit loopy, bringing rising violence and medical emergencies. We first meet her when she is called into a hostage situation with a local cop Sean Delaney, her best friend and sort of boyfriend, being held hostage by a homeless man she knows well, Montana Bob, who believes the noise from the cicadas is the government talking about him and trying to kill him! Her father’s old partner, John or Uncle John as she calls him, is the man in charge of the negotiations and puts her into play accessing the hostage and the culprit’s injuries over the phone and tries to calm Bob down. Bob was only shot in the arm and should have been find, but he dies shortly later and Maggie doesn’t understand why!

That was the newly formed joint SWAT team’s first callout and Maggie’s first call in this new and hard fought for role. A celebration takes place afterwards and unfortunately it is spoilt as her father Tommy ‘the Terminator’ O’Brien turned up to congratulate her and ask when she was going to pick up a gun and become a cop! He is the most infamous cop in town, having resigned before he would have been kicked off the force for alleged brutality, but has never been proud of what she has managed to achieve and his words hurt her deeply. There is far more to his resignation than face value of the facts at the time. He now works as a security guard in the very hospital where she works and when she gets walloped in the face by a drunken patient, because she was distracted, he tells her yet again that she should have a gun and use it! She doesn’t even have a gun for her role with SWAT, always tanking her qualification shooting, when she is in fact a quick-shot competition winner multiple times over. Another dig by her father, putting her down for not following the path he expected. But she will pay for her comments back to him, especially in front of others who actually respect him! Another member of staff makes the comment that the patient will be on The List, a list of people who piss off the staff of all the emergency services.

There is an actual wall with names written on it, hidden away in the staff area, and once it becomes full, it is painted over and then starts all over again. It helps all emergency services staff to vent some of the stress and anger they come under and a way to forget! Weeks later, she is told her own name has been put on the list and presumes it is a cop called Paul who did so. When taking her own name off the list, she sees some names that pull at her memory but she can’t remember why. Until some of Montana Bob’s ramblings come back to her, they were coming for him and have already killed Sancho and Urban and dog and snake! There is something going on and her concerns about Bob’s death, wondering if she may have done something wrong or missed something while he was being treated. Now other people in her care start turning up dead and she wonders if someone is taking the idea of the list a little too seriously and killing off patients as retribution for their actions. Maggie thinks of her fellow staff at the hospital and within the police and SWAT teams, as part of her family and she is loyal to them all. But now she has to worry about justice for the people who are being killed or staying loyal and taking the sides of her colleagues who she relies on every day.

If she betrays the trust of her colleagues and tries to seek justice for the victims, she could be the next target to be killed, but if she does nothing and stays loyal to them, then the balance of justice will fall and fail. She raised concern when she couldn’t not look into Bob’s death immediately after it happened and certain people who were obviously behind these deaths, will take action if she doesn’t keep quiet, no matter whose daughter she is! She makes the difficult decision that even though she might betray the very people she thinks of as family, she has to do it as she believes in justice, unlike her father Tommy, who believes in being in control and being right all the time! Whenever he passes her and the patients she is dealing with, there is no shred of empathy or kindness from him. Just derision and the faint smell of alcohol. Without justice there can be no redemption, especially for those under the influence who might never have done the same whilst sober, or for those who manage to change their lives for the better if they get the chance. Another sudden and unexpected death, after someone got in touch with her, pushes her to a conclusion about all of these deaths.

Maggie has now placed herself in the crosshairs of a killer and has no one on the force she can ask for help, as the blue line has far too strong loyalty between brothers, for her to get any answers from anyone once she starts asking and that will reveal what she is doing as soon as she starts! Anyone at the hospital, her friends and family, could be the killer and she trusts them all with her life, but now must try to figure out how many people have been killed, how they were killed and who is responsible. A dangerous task and made more so by an eager young reporter who has been following Maggie in her jobs for weeks, in order to do a story on her role as the first SWAT female medic, but has also got her own ideas for a much bigger story she could be writing about ‘THE LIST’! Another exceptional story from this author, who has lived the lives being described and can give a true voice to all the medical issues raised here. I can’t wait to pick up yet another book from this author, knowing that it will be an amazing read with such a touch of reality, you can’t ignore it. Certainly an author I would recommend to all who love a good read and a great thriller! I received an ARC copy of this book from BookSprout and I have freely given my own opinion of the book above.