By Deborah Swenson
I had the opportunity recently, to sit down with a copy of Till My Last Breath – Book One in the Desert Hills Trilogy, by Deborah Swenson. Deborah is an emerging Western author, and Till My Last Breath is her first novel. But you wouldn’t know it to read it. Deborah writes with the skill of someone who has been wordsmithing for many years.
Although this is her first work of fiction, as a Registered Nurse and Advanced Nurse Practitioner, Deborah has contributed articles to magazines and nursing textbooks. Her background and knowledge in the health profession informed her writing of her first novel and her main character, Emily Sweeney, who is a twenty-first-century trauma physician in Seattle. Vibrant and driven, Emily seems to be on the fast track to a brilliant medical career. But there are things about her own family that Emily doesn’t know until a tragic accident sends her back in time to the desert outside of Yuma, in Arizona territory, to the year 1880.
Time travel has always fascinated me, and Till My Last Breath reminded me of the Outlander television series based on the novel series of the same name by Diana Gabaldon. I was eager to see how the author was going to pull this off. I don’t want to give away too much, so I’ll just say that Deborah found a way to make a unique and seamless transition from the twenty-first century to the nineteenth century. Almost immediately, our heroine has to put her medical knowledge and skill to work when she comes upon a man in the desert who has been shot and left for dead.
The injured man, Caleb Young, comes from a privileged family in Boston, but his own tragedies have caused him to forsake his wealth and privilege and head west, where he roams from town to town making his living as a gambler.
Emily fights to make sense of her situation and her new surroundings as she struggles to keep Caleb alive with her limited resources and none of her twenty-first-century medicines or equipment. Caleb fights for his next breath as he waits for the men who shot him to come back and finish the job.
The inevitable romance develops between the two as Emily is forced to come to grips with the questions that have come to plague her thoughts; can she somehow find a way to return to her old life? Does she even want to return?
I am not a big reader of romance, and this book is definitely in the Western romance genre, but I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to the rest of the books in the series. There is enough action and gritty, Western machismo to keep any guy interested. The two villains in the book will have you cringing in fear and wrinkling your nose in disgust, and you will become such fans of Emily and Caleb that you, like me, will want to see more of them.
Till My Last Breath is a wonderful addition to my Western library.
Deborah Swenson is a New England born, northwest raised author who is at home writing from an island in the Pacific Northwest where serene views of deep blue waters and majestic mountains greet her each morning. Living and working in the city, she always dreamed of one day living the country life. Loving everything country and western from freshly plowed fields, right down to the sweet smell of a barnyard, her dream became a reality six years ago when she traded commuting in gridlock traffic to driving by cornfields and cows grazing in green pastures. Her love of writing western fiction started fifteen years ago, spurred on by memories of watching the wonderful classic western movies with her Dad. When she began writing, the characters seemed to naturally evolve, and she fell in love with them. Eventually, she sought out writing groups, took college writing classes, and attended conferences. It is through the encouragement of a very dear friend that her dream has become a reality.