I borrowed an audio copy of Jamie Davis‘ Extreme Medical Services through Hoopla.

Description from Goodreads:

Monsters, Paramedics, and Street Medicine.
New paramedic Dean Flynn is fresh out of the academy. When he gets assigned to the unknown backwater ambulance Station U, he wonders what he did wrong. Then Dean learns that his patients aren’t your normal 911 callers. Dean and his partner Brynne Garvey serve the creatures of myth and legend living alongside their normal human neighbors in Elk City. With patients that are vampires, werewolves, fairies and more, will Dean survive his first days on the new job? Will his patients? Not all is well on the streets of Elk City either, and some humans are striking out at their mythical neighbors. Dean soon finds himself in the middle of a series of attacks on his patients, attacks that implicate a former member of Station U.

Review:

I’ll grant that this is well written. Mechanically it feels solid. However, it’s obvious that the author is (or has been) a paramedic, and probably a trainer. Listening to this book was more like sitting through a ‘How to be a proper, empathetic EMT’ than an urban fantasy. Unfortunately, I signed up for a fun fantasy ride, not a didactic sermon (or ten). You might think using all the correct words for things would be a good thing, but coming across things like capnography dropped in casually was a distraction. And there is A LOT of that sort of thing. Worse for the audio version, Scarlato (who did a great job otherwise) wasn’t quite able to make the strange words roll off his tongue. There was often a micro-pause before. So, they stood out even more.

Basically I was bored for most of the book. The vast majority of it is just descriptions of what the ambulance crew do on their runs, with no actual plot. Then, in the last 10% or so a plot finally developed. But apparently it was only being introduced for the next book, which I don’t think I’ll be reading.

Again, it’s not necessarily bad. It’d probably be a great way to get new emergency services students used to some of the ideas. But for the average reader………