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Dramatis personae: The Law: Josie Gray, chief of police in the small, West Texas town of Artemis; Otto Podowski, trusty side-kick; Pete Beckett, hunky fire jumper and hostage negotiator; Dillon, Josie's ex-boyfriend who is suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome in the wake of a kidnapping. The country singers: Billy Nix, who is not very talented or smart, but has a raw streak of honesty in his voice; his wife Brenda Nix, determined, perhaps too determined, that her husband should sign the big contract so they can move to Nashville; Ferris Sinclair, a starstruck hanger-on; Hank, owner of the Hell-Bent Honky Tonk.
While checking house to house in the wake of a wildfire, Josie Gray, Artemis, Texas chief of police, finds a body in a burned dwelling. Although wildfire can trap people in their homes, and although Artemis has its share of old codgers who won't evacuate when told to do so, something about the body and the house looks strange. For one thing, the wildfire did not make it out to this sector of the county (although sparks can be carried on the wind and can start remote fires). For another, the fire's strange pattern looks like an accelerant might have helped things. Also: Why is the unbound body on the couch? Why didn't the victim run for his life?
The rest of the novel unfolds as Josie checks facts, tracks down the identity of the body, and constructs a timeline that could point to a possible murderer. In her private life, Josie feels the loss of Dillon, a man who loved her but left her in the wake of his being held hostage by members of a Mexican drug cartel. Josie meets up with an old friend, Pete Beckett, a fire-jumper and hostage-negotiator who may be able to mend some holes in Josie's heart.
To tell more would be to give away the solution to the mystery. Trisha Fields has improved since I read SCRATCHGRAVEL ROAD, her mystery concerning a nuclear power plant in south Texas. Her characters do not yet invite my sympathy or involve me in their lives (as the best fictional characters do). I know that as Fields grows as a writer, so will her deftness with characterization.
The West Texas that she paints is recognizable as sparsely populated, inhabited by various "characters" and admitting of the angers and greeds that drive city folk to do ill. This view of West Texas painted in FIREBREAK, however, remains the two-dimensional sort and lies waiting for some other magic to lift it into the realm of the living.
§ Cathy Downs, Ph.D., is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville, and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, April 2015
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