Booklists: suggested reading

 

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On Fire Booklist

 

Fiction (all genres) and Nonfiction about fire, arson, and firemen/firewomen.

 

Annotations are from Advance, the Ingram Book Magazine, unless noted.

Fiction

• Fahrenheit 451
  Author: Bradbury, Ray
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0743247221 Date: 2003
  LJ
  Nowadays firemen start fires. Fireman Guy Montag loves to rush to a fire and watch books burn up. Then he met a seventeen-year old girl who told him of a past when people were not afraid, and a professor who told him of a future where people could think. And Guy Montag knew what he had to do....
  Suggested Reading: Books About Books
  Updated 11.18.03
• Fireplay
  Author: Chazin, Suzanne
  Publisher: Putnam $ 25.95 ISBN: 0399150536 Date: 2003
  FDNY fire marshal George Skeehan hunts a killer walking the streets of Manhattan in this five-alarm thriller and third in the series.
  Also: The Fourth Angel, 2001 and Flash Over, 2002
  Updated 8.2.04
• Pyro
  Author: Emerson, Earl
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345462882 Date: 2004
  Kirkus
  From the bestselling author of Vertical Burn and Into the Inferno comes a pulse-racing thriller based on startling true events involving arson and murder.
  Updated 6.30.04
• Into the Inferno
  Author: Emerson, Earl
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 23.95 ISBN: 0345445910 Date: 2003
  Firefighter Jim Swope responds with his crew to a truck collision on an icy freeway. Six months later, the firefighters succumb to unexplained ailments. Jim doesn't realize it yet, but he has only seven days to determine how he and his fellow firefighters have been poisoned and to discover an antidote.
  Updated 8.2.04
• Vertical Burn
  Author: Emerson, Earl
  Publisher: Ballantine $ 24.95 ISBN: 0345445899 Date: 2002
  When Seattle firefighter John Finney has no memory of the warehouse fire in which his partner perished, grave questions arise: Was Finney responsible for the death of his partner? As more deadly fires erupt, Finney is ultimately accused of arson. But is he guilty? Or has he somehow fallen into a tangled net of conspiracy?
  Updated 8.2.04
• Home Fires Burning
  Author: Maron, Margaret
  Publisher: Mysterious List Price: $ 22 ISBN: 089296656 Date: 1998
  PW
  North Carolina judge Deborah Knott engages in her own investigation of an arsonist in the midst of her campaigning for reelection in this sixth installment of this award-winning series.
  
  
• Doohickey
  Author: Hautman, Pete
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 24 ISBN: 0743200195 Date: 2002
  When Nick Fashon's clothing shop and apartment burn to the ground, Nick is left with nothing but his grandfather's strange plastic contrivance called the "HandyMate." With a cast of colorful characters and a plot with more twists and turns than the HandyMate itself, Doohickey is a stylishly funny mystery from a master storyteller.
  Updated 8.2.04
• Beyond Recognition
  Author: Pearson, Ridley
  Publisher: Hyperion List Price: $22.95 ISBN: 0786862408 Date: 1997
  Booklist Kirkus
  In this new, white-hot thriller by the author of nine bestselling novels, brilliant forensic investigator Police Sgt Lou Boldt returns to battle a mysterious arsonist. Its's a deadly, taunting game of cat-and-mouse, where the stakes are raised to a burning point that might spell disaster for Boldt - and the city of Seattle.
  
• Broken Places
  Author: Perabo, Susan
  Publisher: Simon & Schuster $ 23 ISBN: 0684862344 Date: 2001
  With this elegant and psychologically penetrating novel, Perabo invites readers into the world of Paul Tucker, a 12-year-old boy profoundly burdened by his family's rich tradition of conspicuous valor and heroism. Subtly heartbreaking and wise, The Broken Places is a masterful exploration of the precarious intersection of honor, duty, and family.
  Updated 8.2.04
• Weeping: A Fritillary Quilter Mystery
  Author: Reuben, Shelly
  Publisher: Justin Charles $ 13.99 (paper) ISBN: 1932112200 Date: 2004
  Booklist
  Tilly Quilter, a sassy, opinionated New York fire investigator, knows that something's amiss when a victim's family doesn't seem at all interested in helping get to the bottom of a fatal fire.
  Updated 2.23.04
• Spent Matches
  Author: Reuben, Shelly
  Publisher: Scribner $ 21 ISBN: 0684801078 Date: 1996
  In this novel by fire forensics expert Shelly Rueben, Wylie Nolan and attorney Max Bramble probe three puzzling fires. In the first, five large paintings at the Zigfield Museum go up in smoke, abruptly ending a controversial exhibition. The second series of fires targets Wylie and Max's friend, attorney Miranda Yee. While beautiful Georgiana Weeks, guest curator at the mueseum, is the unknowing catalyst for yet a third fire.
  Updated 8.2.04
• Death Du Jour
  Author: Reichs, Kathleen J.
  Publisher: Scribner Price: $ 25 ISBN: 0684841185 Date: 1999
  PW Booklist
  Using her forensic skills - from the crime scene to the morgue to the lab - Tempe Brennan probes a mystery that begins with horrifying deaths in a fire in Quebec and culminates in Montreal with a terrifying showdown.
  Suggested Reading: Crime Scene Investigations
• Playing With Fire
  Author: Robinson, Peter
  Publisher: Morrow $ 23.95 ISBN: 006019877x Date: 2004
  Booklist
  Multiple-prize-winning and international bestselling author Robinson returns with a new novel of burning suspense, as a deadly case of arson leads Inspector Banks into his most dangerous case yet.
  Updated 11.25.03
• Masters of Illusion
  Author: Smith, Mary-Ann Tirone
  Publisher: Warner $ 28 ISBN: 0446518069 Date: 1994
  PW
  The author of Lament for a Silver-Eyed Woman now presents a beautifully crafted novel that goes beyond the actual events of a terrible fire to tell a story that is part suspense, part obsession and, as it unravels the emotional and physical scars of the past, part remarkable testament to life and love.
  Updated 8.2.04
• The Rescue
  Author: Sparks, Nicholas
  Publisher: Warner $ ISBN: 0446525502 Date: 2000
  Volunteer fireman Taylor McAden couldn't bring himself to take one risk: to fall in love. When he meets single mother Denise Holton, who's involved in a near-fatal car crash during a violent storm in their small North Carolina town, Taylor must look into his past and see if it's not too late to take a chance on the future.
  Updated 8.2.04
• Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights
  Author: Straight, Susan
  Publisher: Hyperion $ 21.95 ISBN: 0786860030 Date: 1994
  Booklist PW
  I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots established Straight as one of America's foremost chroniclers of African American life. Now, with this novel, she becomes one of the first novelists to write about the dangers and complexities facing young African American men today. Darnell Tucker works as a firefighter fighting brush fires and as a handyman when he can find the work, as he tries to support his young family while most of the friends he grew up with are succumbing to drugs and violence.
  Updated 8.2.04
• California Fire and Life
  Author: Winslow, Don
  Publisher: Knopf List Price: $ 23 ISBN: 0679454314 Date: 1999
  PW
  From the author of The Death and Life of Bobby Z comes an unstoppable new novel about a Southern California Gold Coast conflagration of greed, deceit, and murder, and the one man trying to fight it.
  Suggested Reading: Mobbed Up

Nonfiction

• Triangle: the Fire That Changed America
  Author: Von Drehle, David
  Publisher: Atlantic $ 26 ISBN: 0871138743 Date: 2003
  PW
  This poignantly detailed account explores the 1911 factory fire that horrified the country and changed the course of 20th-century politics and labor relations.
  Updated 5.19.03
• Fire
  by Junger, Sebastian
  Publisher: Norton $ 23.95 ISBN: 0393010465 Date: 2001
  Kirkus Publishers Weekly
  For readers of The Perfect Storm, opening this long-awaited new work by Junger will be like stepping off the deck of the Andrea Gail and into the inferno of a fire burning out of control in the steep canyons of Idaho. From the murderous mechanics of the diamond trade in Sierra Leone to the logic of guerrilla warfare in Afghanistan and the forensics of genocide in Kosovo, this new collection of Junger's nonfiction will take readers places they wouldn't dream of going to on their own.
  
• Fire on the Mountain: The True Story of the South Canyon Fire
  by MacLean, John N.
  Publisher: William Morrow & Company Inc ISBN: 0-688-14477-2 $ 24 Date: 1999
  PW
  MacLean takes a long, hard look at the July 3, 1994, fire at Storm King Mountain in Colorado, where 14 firefighters, including four women, were killed. Fire on the Mountain offers deeply moving insights into the lives of the smoke jumpers, hot shots, and helitacks who fight forest fires and put their own well being on the line as part of their jobs.
  
• Ship Ablaze: The Tragedy of the Steamboat General Slocum
  Author: O'Donnell, Edward T.
  Publisher: Broadway $ 24.95 ISBN: 0767909054 Date: 2003
  Booklist
  Ship Ablaze is the extraordinary, untold story of the 1904 maritime disaster that took the lives of more than a thousand New Yorkers.
  Updated 7.6.04
• The Circus Fire: A True Story
  by O'Nan, Stewart
  Publisher: Doubleday $ 24.95 ISBN: 0385496842 Date: 2000
  PW
  One of America's most acclaimed novelists turns to nonfiction in this powerful recreation of the great Hartford circus fire of 1944 which took the lives of 167 people and forever changed the city.
  
• Working Fire: A Memoir
  Author: Unger, Zac
  Publisher: Penguin $ 24.95 ISBN: 1594200017
  Kirkus
  This remarkable memoir, by turns funny and deeply moving, explores one man's coming into his calling and his transformation from ambivalent Ivy League grad to skilled and dedicated firefighter.
  Updated 12.29.03