EMT follows Kristine, an EMT working on the Moon. She wants to save everyone, but recent budget cuts are threatening to cause her and her colleagues to lose more and more patients.

The story in EMT is pretty straight forward. There are no plot twists or surprises. It almost feels like a chapter from a longer work, and starts off with a review of the books for Schneider’s company. Even though it resolves nicely at the end, and just the way I expected it to resolve, it felt weak. The pacing is fairly steady, and Kristine makes for an interesting protagonist.

The only characters really developed in EMT are Kristine and the owner of the company, Schneider. The rest of the characters fulfill their roles, but don’t develop much depth. The “bad guy” has only a brief appearance before being defeated, though the main characters discuss him a bit.

If David L. Burkhead decided to expand this story into a novelette or novella, I could see a few interesting story lines reminiscent of Doc Smith‘s Skylark series (which was often called “General Hospital in space”). This would be more along the lines of the Emergency! television series, with a focus on EMTs in space.

EMT was a very quick read. My copy (a Kindle ebook) had a large number of typos, missing words, and bad punctuation scattered throughout it. A good copy editor would have caught all of those, and they shouldn’t be this prevalent in a product for sale. Outside of that, it was a fun and quick little story that requires no emotional investment and provides some decent adventure and tension.

Release Date: February 15, 2014 (USA)
ISBNs: none
Publisher: self
Language: English

MySF Rating: Three point zero stars
Family Friendliness: 100%

Content:

Alcohol/Drugs: 0
Language: 1 (brief, minor)
Sexuality: 0
Violence: 1 (some blood, death, nothing graphic)