Countless twists and turns keep the tension sky-high in E.G. Scott’s new thriller In Case of Emergency. Characters that are fully fleshed out, and fascinating, tell a story that is equal parts medical thriller and criminal mystery.
Charlotte is an acupuncturist whose practice is not as lively as she wishes it was, and her love life is not as lively as she wishes it was either. She feels so close to Peter, but he is away so much that their relationship has become quite strained. She keeps their relationship a secret, per his request, but it is starting to wear Charlotte down.
We know right away that there are mysteries in Charlotte’s background. She used to be a surgeon, but now she focuses exclusively on Eastern medicine. She also appears to put much more faith and attention on her online support group than she does in any face-to-face relationships. We also know that Charlotte has spent some time in a mental health facility (though we don’t know the details until much later in the story). This may make her more, or less, likeable for some readers, or more or less reliable as a narrator.
She is not our only narrator however, as E.G. Scott’s novel is arranged in a way where each character narrates his or her own parts of the story. This includes Charlotte, her best friend Rachel, as well as the two detectives involved.
The detectives, Silvestri and Wolcott, enter the story because when a young lady is found dead in the park, she has Charlotte’s contact information on her as her in case of emergency contact. Charlotte, however, has no idea why.
The characters tangle and untangle around each other as the mystery of who this dead young woman is and what connection she has to Charlotte ramps up into high gear. Rachel, it turns out, has some of her own secrets, and these begin to affect Charlotte in surprising ways.
Secrets, twists, and revelations abound in this tale of friendship, regrets, mistakes, and grief. While there are some moments that the reader may feel a little off-balance trying to figure out the world they have been dropped in to, it is a world that is so well developed that the gradual unfolding of the details bring about a new development every time. E.G. Scott has written an exceptional story that keeps the reader guessing, but ultimately wraps everything up completely.
In Case of Emergency is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers, like your local bookstore.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
The new thriller from E. G. Scott follows a woman looking for answers after her boyfriend goes missing and a corpse appears that implicates her in the murder of a woman she never met.
Charlotte, a midthirties Long Island woman, has felt so alone since her promising career in neuroscience imploded. But she has an online support group for trauma survivors; she has Rachel, a friend who has seen her through the worst of it; and now she also has Peter, a mysterious new boyfriend who has asked that their budding romance remain a total secret.
That is why she is too scared to report his disappearance to the authorities when he vanishes without a word.
Weeks later, police contact her to make an ID on a body and she fears the worst for her missing beau. Instead, she arrives at the morgue and feels a terrible relief when she sees a woman she has never met before on the table in front of her. But relief is replaced by confusion, then terror, when Charlotte realizes she has become a person of interest.
Why did Jane Doe have Charlotte listed as her emergency contact? Was it revenge or a warning? And where exactly does Peter factor into all this? As Charlotte becomes the prime murder suspect, she enters into a race against the clock to find truth about the dead woman and the connections they shared. But what she discovers is beyond anything she could have ever imagined.
