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TILL MY LAST BREATH by Deborah Swenson

TILL MY LAST BREATH

From the Desert Hills Trilogy series, volume 1

by Deborah Swenson

Pub Date: Dec. 24th, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-09-833571-7
Publisher: BookBaby

A Western time-travel romance in which a woman goes back in time to save a handsome gambler.

In 1880 Arizona, Caleb Young is gambling with a few friendly men in a saloon when a suspicious stranger walks in and asks to join them. When the stranger obviously cheats, Caleb calls him out on it, and the man reacts poorly by drawing his gun. Caleb does, too, and the altercation ends with the stranger dead. Caleb leaves town, finding a run-down cabin in the middle of nowhere to hide, but a mysterious figure finds and shoots him, leaving him for dead. In 2019 Seattle, Dr. Emily Sweeney is just starting her trauma-center shift when she hears gunshots coming from the waiting room. She runs toward the scene and gets shot while attempting to help. Emily never wakes up—at least, not in her own body or in her own time. She has a vision of an older gentleman who claims to be her great-great-grandfather and says that he has a gift for her. Emily then wakes up dressed in strange clothing, some 200 feet from a cabin where more gunshots ring out. Soon, she finds a half-dead Arizonan bleeding out. It’s clear that Emily and Caleb are inexplicably connected and potentially in danger. Over the course of this novel, Swenson presents a story that not only flows through different eras with ease, but also through different genres with equal facility. The narrative is solidly paced and displays the author’s gift for salient detail, and the chronology moves forward and backward, as necessary, to provide readers with the full story without ever sacrificing clarity along the way. The characters feel fully fleshed-out and genuine; readers will be particularly intrigued by Emily’s modern perspective on a time and place that’s very different from her own.

A fine blend of genres with an engaging protagonist.