The Coroner by Jennifer Graeser Dornbush
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Released August 7, 2018
Kindle|Paperback|Audible
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Summoned from her promising surgical career first to her estranged father’s bedside, and then his post as medical examiner when his small town needs urgent help with a suspicious death, Emily Hartford discovers home is where the bodies are in this pitch perfect mystery debut.
Recently engaged and deeply ensconced in her third year of surgical residency in Chicago, Emily Hartford gets a shock when she’s called home to Freeport, MI, the small town she fled a decade ago after the death of her mother. Her estranged father, the local medical examiner, has had a massive heart attack and Emily is needed urgently to help with his recovery.
Not sure what to expect, Emily races home, blowing the only stoplight at the center of town and getting pulled over by her former high school love, now Sheriff, Nick Larson. At the hospital, she finds her father in near total denial of the seriousness of his condition. He insists that the best thing Emily can do to help him is to take on the autopsy of a Senator’s teen daughter whose sudden, unexplained death has just rocked the sleepy town.
Reluctantly agreeing to help her father and Nick, Emily gets down to work, only to discover that the girl was murdered. The autopsy reminds her of her many hours in the morgue with her father when she was a young teen—a time which inspired her love of medicine. Before she knows it, she’s pulled deeper into the case and closer to her father and to Nick—much to the dismay of her big city fiance. When a threat is made to Emily herself, she must race to catch the killer before he strikes again in The Coroner, expertly written and sharply plotted, perfect for fans of Patricia Cornwell and Julia Spencer Fleming.
I am so annoyed with this book/series. It was a little slow out of the gate but there towards the end I was loving it. Things that I wanted to happen, happened. Then there was a cliffhanger, and honestly I am all for a cliff. I’m not upset about that, I am upset that the second book ins’t available in Audible Escape, like The Corner.
I was excited to see what would happen next and was prepared to grab the next book in the series when I had the rug pulled out from under me! I realize that I probably should have researched a bit more prior to grabbing this one and I will from now on.
But about The Corner, I really enjoyed the story and although it followed a fairly standard story arc I still got invested in. There is just something about following along to help solve a murder that I can’t get enough of. It’s probably the fact that I want to investigate and solve a murder myself.
I loved Emily and her high school sweetheart, Nick’s chemistry. It was everything that I could ask for and more. He definitely had some unrequited feelings that everyone except Emily could see. I loved how invested Emily got in the case even though she was trying to tell herself she wouldn’t stay in her home town long.
There are so many good things about The Coroner that I loved and not being able to solve the murder was the icing on the cake. This is on romantic suspense book you don’t want to miss!
