J. AndrewWhitley

COMING SOONThe best stories are still waiting to be told.Whether it's a heartwarming mystery in a small town, a chilling supernatural thriller, or a practical guide inspired by years in emergency communications, every upcoming book shares one goal: to leave readers with a story that stays with them long after the final page.Harmony Hills Stories
Where Every Mystery Teaches a LessonStep into the welcoming town of Harmony Hills, where friendly neighbors, curious young detectives, and timeless values come together in unforgettable adventures for young readers.The series begins with The Case of the Church Bells, introducing Wozzy and his family as they solve a mystery that reminds us of the importance of kindness, teamwork, and looking beyond first impressions.With charming characters, beautiful illustrations, and positive messages, Harmony Hills is a place children will want to visit again and again.Status: Currently in editing and illustration.Figure in the Flames
Some fires leave more than ashes behind.Veteran firefighter Jake McCloud has spent years running toward danger. But after responding to a devastating apartment fire, he begins seeing a mysterious figure within the flames—one no one else seems to notice.As impossible events unfold, Jake is forced to confront a tragedy from his past and a presence that may not be there to haunt him... but to save him.A supernatural suspense novel blending mystery, emotion, and hope, Figure in the Flames explores courage, redemption, and the moments that define us.Status: Currently in editing.After the Call
What happens after the headset comes off?Behind the Headset focused on surviving the profession.After the Call explores what comes next.Drawing from real experiences as a 911 dispatcher and shift supervisor, this follow-up book examines the emotional impact of emergency communications through personal stories, lessons learned, and reflections on the calls that stay with us long after the shift ends.It's a book about resilience, healing, and remembering that behind every calm voice on the other end of the line is a real person carrying invisible weight.Whether you're a dispatcher, first responder, supervisor, or someone who loves one, After the Call offers an honest look at the human side of one of the world's most demanding professions.Status: In development.

CHAPTER 1It was quiet in the bunk room of Ashford Fire Station 4. The crews had only been asleep for about two hours; it had been a busy evening. A medical call, a garbage fire, a fire alarm, and one memorable gentleman with his hand stuck in a bathtub drain had kept them up past two. When the alarm clanked and the automated lights came on, dim but blinding all the same when you were surfacing out of two hours of sleep. Jake heard a groan roll down the row of bunks from both directions.
"0630-hour wake-up call, Brown County dispatch, clear."
Captain Jake McCloud knew that voice well. His childhood friend — more like a brother, forty years running — Mark Holloway, working the dispatch console across town. Mark had been doing the morning wake-up for Station 4 for years now, ever since the warehouse fire took him off the trucks and put him behind a desk, and somewhere along the line it had stopped being a duty and turned into a ritual. Jake could have set his watch by it. Some mornings the voice was all business. Some mornings there was a little something extra in it, just for him.
Jake rolled over, gathered himself for a moment the way a man in his fifties does before committing to standing up, and reached for his phone.
Thanks for disrupting my beauty sleep, you jerk, he typed.
The reply came before he’d even set the phone down.
Yeah, you sure need all you can get.
Jake snorted and typed back: Some of us worked last night.
Some of us are working right now. Go make your coffee, old man.
In an hour and a half, he’d be on his way home for the next twenty-four hours. No overtime, no side jobs, none of the extra work he’d spent thirty years piling on. Just time. He splashed water on his face in the captain’s bathroom, looked at himself in the mirror a moment longer than he used to, grayer every year, the lines a little deeper. He went to start the desperately needed pot of coffee.
He stepped into the apparatus bay just as the one-month rookie rounded the engine with an armload of truck-wash supplies.
"Good morning, Captain," Adam Hanly said, entirely too awake.
"Morning, rook. At it early, aren’t you?"
"Yes, sir. Just ready to get home."
"Keep it up." Jake almost smiled. There was a particular energy to a firefighter with a month on the job, when everything was still shiny, everything was still worth doing right. It wore off. He hoped, for the kid’s sake, it wore off slowly.
In the kitchen he found the rest of Engine 4 and Ladder 4’s crews gathered around the table, in the loose, rumpled, half-awake congregation that formed there every morning. That kitchen table had become the center of Station 4. Everything either happened or was discussed there — every meal, every argument about sports and politics and the correct way to load hose, every hard call talked down to size in the small hours. Happy moments, laughter, the very occasional cry that nobody ever mentioned afterward. Thirty years and a dozen stations, and it was always the table. Every firehouse had one. This was theirs.
Ben Hollis was holding court at the far end of it, which was the natural state of things.
Four years on Engine 4 as nozzle man, a big easy laugh and an opinion about everything.
"Cap. Settle something." Ben didn’t even look up from his mug. "Carver says a hot dog is a sandwich. Tell him he’s out of his mind."
"It’s structurally a sandwich," Carver said, unbothered. Lieutenant Danny Carver was the driver, twenty-two years on, and possessed the immovable calm of a man who had seen everything twice. "Bread, filling. Sandwich."
"It’s a taco configuration at best”
"Don’t drag me into this," said Ray Hoskins from across the table, not looking up from his eggs. Lieutenant Hoskins ran Ladder 4, the truck company that shared the house with Engine 4, a lean, unflappable man a few years off from his own thirty, with a couple of his crew flanking him and working through the last of the coffee. "Last time I had an opinion on the hot dog thing I didn’t hear the end of it for a week."
"Because you were wrong," Ben said.
"Because I was right, and this crew can’t handle being told." Hoskins finally glanced up, dry as ever. "Cap, back me up. You’re retiring, you’ve got nothing to lose."
"I’m not doing this before coffee," Jake said, as he grabbed a mug and sat down anyway, because the truth was there was nowhere on earth he’d rather have his first cup than at that table with these idiots. Adam drifted in from the bay and took the seat nobody had to tell him was the rookie seat, the one nearest the door. Ben immediately slid the sports section his way with a
"Here, rook, educate yourself," which was Ben’s entire love language.
Jake had lifted the mug halfway to his mouth when the alarm clanged again.
"Station 4, Engine 1, Rescue 1, Engine 13 — structure fire, 1453 Maple Lane."
"Well," Jake said, setting the coffee down untouched, "I guess there’s no rest this morning. Let’s roll."
The kitchen was emptied in seconds. Coffee cups hit the table, chairs scraped back, and the crew moved with the kind of tired efficiency that only comes from doing something ten thousand times — no wasted motion, no words that didn’t need saying. Jake pulled his gear from the rack and stepped into his boots, yanking his suspenders up over his shoulders as he rounded the engine.
Carver was already behind the wheel. "Maple Lane," he said as Jake climbed into the officer’s seat. "That’s the Birchwood Apartments."
"Six floors." Jake reached for his helmet. "Let’s hope it’s a kitchen fire."
Ben hauled himself up into the back with the unhurried economy of a man who’d done it a thousand times, already reaching for his SCBA straps. Adam came up beside him, still fastening his coat, the shine gone out of him now, replaced by the tight quiet focus Jake had watched settle over a hundred rookies on their way to their first real jobs. Jake did a quick headcount, confirmed everyone was seated and belted, and nodded to Carver.
The engine growled out into the pale morning light.
Two more months.
The thought arrived the way it always did lately. Very quietly, and without warning, uninvited. Two more months and he’d hand in his gear for the last time. Thirty years on the job, the last eight as captain of Station 4, and he was nearly done. He caught his own reflection, ghostlike, in the side window over the rushing street: a man in a helmet he’d worn so long it had shaped itself to his head.
He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. Both things were true at once: he still loved this work in a way he had never been able to fully explain to anyone who hadn’t done it, and he was ready to leave it behind. Ready in a way that had been building slowly for years, like pressure behind a door.
He had given everything he had to this job. He believed that. On his worst days, when doubt crept in during the quiet hours of a night shift, he could still hold onto that. Every call, every fire, every person he had pulled from somewhere that they shouldn’t have been. He had given everything he had.
Almost everything.
There was one he couldn’t let go of. Twenty-five years, and he still carried her. A young woman he had not been able to reach in time, in one of his earliest fires. He had tried. He had refused to stop trying until they pulled him back, physically pulled him, and even then, he hadn’t wanted to stop. It hadn’t been enough. It was never going to be enough, and somewhere deep down he knew that no number of right decisions since that day was ever going to fully balance the weight of that one wrong outcome.
He never spoke about it. Not to his crew, not even to Mark. And not to Sarah, though there was a time he thought he might have. Things between them had gone quiet in the last year, a careful, courteous quiet, the kind that grows between two people who still love each other and have forgotten how to say so. That morning he’d left before she was up. He’d stood in the bedroom doorway for a second, watching her sleep, and then he’d gone without waking her, and told himself it was kindness. He wasn’t sure anymore that it was.
The fire, at least, was simple. He knew how to do the fire. "Engine 1 is en route, heavy smoke showing from the third floor."
"So much for a kitchen fire," Carver muttered.
Jake picked up the radio and began coordinating with the other responding units. In the jump seats behind him, the crew prepared in silence. Everyone had their own way of getting their head right on the way to a working fire. Ben went quiet, which for Ben was its own kind of remarkable. Adam stared at the floor and breathed. Jake’s way was simple: he watched the road ahead and let everything else go quiet.
The smoke was visible before they turned onto Maple Lane.
Black and thick, rolling up into the grey morning sky.
Jake felt the familiar tightening in his chest. Not fear, exactly, but something close to it. Something that never quite went away, no matter how many fires he had seen. After thirty years he had stopped expecting it to.
"Pull up to the front," he said.
Carver brought Engine 4 to a stop, and Jake reached for the door handle.