It's not often that a suspense novel's ending is truly unknown until the end of the book. It has to be difficult to accomplish. Nonetheless, that is exactly what local author Earl Emerson does in Into the Inferno. And I do mean the very last page.
It begins--as do all of Emerson's books, in my opinion--with a great opening line: "I'm a mad dog. Utterly mad." Jim Swope, firefighter, is naked on the roof of a police car, holding a cell phone to one ear and a gun pointed at the other. He's sure that he's experiencing his last moments of life, and he has made his peace with that. The story of how he came to be there begins in chapter two, with Jim responding to an accident on an icy stretch of I-90. It is a normal night of work for the department, and no one knows the strange events that that the accident has set into motion.
Six months later, the firefighters who were on the scene that night begin to have accidents and illnesses that can't be explained. When Jim shows the first symptoms of sharing their fate, he realizes that he must figure out what happened to them all, or his life will be over within a week. We spend that week with Jim as he rushes to put together clues and to find a way to save his own life and those of his fellow firefighters. And we don't find out whether he's successful or not until the last page. Now that's suspense.
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