Pilot Lieutenant Commander Ellie Somers works for the Coast Guard service, flying out of Alaska’s Air Station Siska – the toughest flying job in the service. The only woman at the station, Ellie has trouble fitting in – the wives don’t really like her, and her colleagues don’t appreciate just how good she is. Her only real competition, Sam Patano, never misses an opportunity to dump on her. But when Ellie’s flying none of that matters. She’s just saved her fourteenth person, a man who sailed right into a storm, and she used some great moves to get him and her team safely ashore. For Ellie, it’s all about the flying and the tricks.
Until the night Ellie and her crew are sent out after a suspicious boat. When it doesn’t slow, Ellie taps the cabin with her skids, over the protests of her crewmates. Suddenly her helicopter loses control, and the last thing she remembers in the water closing in. When Ellie wakes up it’s to devastating news, news that causes Ellie to pack up her life and take off with a stranger. It’s uncharacteristic behaviour, but Ellie’s still in shock.
I was disappointed when I began reading Saved – the writing was technical and bogged down by detail (I now know considerably more than I ever thought I would about the Coast Guard service, helicopter operations and rescues), and slabs of exposition were justified by a journalist character who existed almost solely to have things explained to him. I was particularly frustrated by the lack of detail about Ellie’s last rescue – the man who sailed right into a storm was an irritating cipher. I was p[articularly disappointed because I'd sought this out after so enjoying Morgenroth's YA novel, Framed.
But about half way through the novel I became gripped, as the ponderous information gave way to a number of mysteries. Why has Nicholas, the stranger Ellie meet in a clothing shop, brought her with him to Vegas? What’s the story behind his relationship with his shipping tycoon father? Why is Ellie acting so uncharacteristically? What will her former colleagues uncover about the event that so dramatically affected her life? Is Ellie really as abandoned and forgotten as she thought? Most of all, what’s the secret Nicolas is hiding, and what lengths has he gone to to engineer the current situation?
Though not hugely convoluted, Saved has a number of plot twists that depend on surprise, which is why I’m being so cryptic. All the questions and more are answered by the end of this very satisfying, in initially turgid novel. - Alex
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