Title: Waiting Hours
Description: "When you spend your life saving others... who will be there to save you? When tragedy erupts out of a summer night's stifling darkness, the whole city of Halifax finds itself suddenly mired in a labyrinth of sorrow and anger. The city's inhabitants are already prickly from a heat wave and a tropical storm threatens to make landfall. Caught in the middle are three ordinary people with extraordinary jobs: rescuing strangers in different ways. All of them are deeply devoted to what they do, but they are all beginning to crack under the immense pressures of their work. Tough-as-nails Kate is a trauma nurse who spends her off-duty hours drinking to forget her ER shifts...when she's not working with her beloved search-and-rescue dog, Zeus. Estranged from her troubled family, she is suddenly forced to confront the fact that resolution may elude her forever. Respected police officer Mike can't admit that he's on the edge of burnout. When he makes the mistake of looking in a young crime victim's eyes, he sets himself on a downward spiral that may be impossible to break, slowly fraying the bonds of love that hold his family together. And agoraphobic Tamara is a 911 dispatcher who tries her hardest to remain as calm and emotionless as an automated message, removed from the pain of the outside world. But one night, Tamara is propelled straight into the middle of a story that she can't avoid. Can she bear to enter the daylight world once again to find out how the story ends? Tamara, Mike, Kate: they are all connected to one another, in ways both explicit and invisible. And they will all be forced to make their own fateful choices, bringing changes no one could have foreseen."--
Subjects: English literature, First responders, Fiction, Job stress, Rescue work