Troubled by the feeling that she belongs nowhere after working in East Africa for 15 years, Frankie Rowley has come home -- home to the small New Hampshire town of Pomeroy and the farmhouse where her family has always summered. On her first night back, a house up the road burns to the ground. Is it an accident, or arson? Over the weeks that follow, as Frankie comes to recognize her father's slow failing and her mother's desperation, another house...

As exciting as a police procedural, this novel is, instead, a "fireman's procedural", tracing the story of a fire lieutenant's death twenty-five years ago in an arson fire, the failed hunt for the pyromaniac who set it, and the "pyro's" possible return to action in Seattle during a spate of recent arsons. Twenty-nine-year-old Paul Wollf is the son of this lieutenant, who died when Wollf was only four, an event which destroyed his childhood. His mother,...