Maggie O’Brien is an Emergency Room nurse and a tactical medic on a SWAT team. Maggie has just joined the team and is responding to her first call, a hostage situation. The hostage taker is Montana Bob, a “crazy” who has frequented the ER enough to occasionally bring Maggie flowers. At the scene Maggie realizes her sometime lover Sean Delaney is the officer who is down with a gunshot wound. Her part in talking Bob out and getting them both to the hospital is a real victory for Maggie and she is stunned when Bob dies there with the minor wound he had sustained.

Her victory does catapult her to newsworthy status and the paper assigns a rather rookie reporter to do a feature series on her. This reporter is not quite so young and naïve as she appears.

As in most professions that require any type of teamwork in stressful situations, team members generally compile lists. Lists of troublemakers, people you can’t trust, general scum, etc., and in this hospital the staff had dedicated a wall in their lounge for their list. During the “Montana Bob” situation Bob kept screaming people were out to kill him because they had already killed “Sancho and Urban and the dawg and the snake” Maggie is stunned when she notices some of these names on the wall.

This story is told from Maggie’s single point of view, and with a lot of inner dialogue. This is the sole drawback of the With a Vengeance, since this style doesn’t seem to permit the author to vary the pace of the story. This may not make any difference to individual readers.

So since Maggie is the focus, the reader learns early that her father was a police officer who had resigned from the force and continues to work in security at the same hospital where Maggie works. Maggie for years has been trying to distance herself from him, as he appears to be a brutal uncompromising tyrant. Growing up with five or six stepmothers and the pressure on her to become a cop has left her with both an unusual maturity and an unusual ability to sense impending disaster.

The next emergency crystallizes the feeling that Montana Bob had assistance in dying. Her team responds to another hostage crisis that ends tragically. Maggie’s own investigation reveals that these unexplained deaths are for the most part occurring at her hospital, which possibly points a finger at someone she works with and admires. The decision as to whether or not to go forward is never in doubt due to Maggie’s integrity, but the results are not predictable.

Dreyer fashions unique and memorable characters, which is her greatest strength. The characters interact with a light and warm humor, and with dialogue that is always in voice. Her scenes are realistic and we can rely upon them to be accurate depictions of these types of emergencies. .

With a Vengeance offers a bit more of a love story than is usual for her, creating a package that will offer something to every reader. As with all of Eileen Dreyer’s books, this is another keeper.

--Thea Davis