American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land - Softcover

Hesse, Monica

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1631494511 ISBN 13: 9781631494512

Publisher: Liveright, 2018

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Book of the Year
One of Amazon’s 20 Best Books of the Year
Named one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed, Bustle, NPR, NYLON, and Thrillist
Finalist for the Goodreads Book Award (Nonfiction)
Finalist for the Edgar Award (Best Fact Crime)
A Book of the Month Club Selection
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection

“A brisk, captivating and expertly crafted reconstruction of a community living through a time of fear.... Masterful.” ―Washington Post

The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate―there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.

“One of the year’s best and most unusual true-crime books” (Christian Science Monitor), American Fire brings to vivid life the reeling county of Accomack. “Ace reporter” (Entertainment Weekly) Monica Hesse spent years investigating the story, emerging with breathtaking portraits of the arsonists―troubled addict Charlie Smith and his girlfriend, Tonya Bundick. Tracing the shift in their relationship from true love to crime spree, Hesse also conjures the once-thriving coastal community, decimated by a punishing economy and increasingly suspicious of their neighbors as the culprits remained at large. Weaving the story into the history of arson in the United States, the critically acclaimed American Fire re-creates the anguished nights this quiet county lit up in flames, evoking a microcosm of rural America―a land half-gutted before the fires began.

8 pages of illustrations

About this title

Review

An Amazon Best Book of July 2017: A passionate love affair is often described as an “inferno,” but in 2012 and 2013, boyfriend and girlfriend Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick turned the metaphor into reality as they lit 70-plus fires in derelict buildings across Virginia’s Accomack County. Monica Hesse’s spare but memorable prose sketches the true story of a once-prosperous county now in sharp economic decline, its derelict buildings easy targets for Smith and Bundick. But Accomack County’s plunging fortunes is the simplistic explanation for the arson epidemic, and Hesse pushes that aside to plumb the complicated personal relationships, the tight-knit community, and the stories told in small towns that can shape a person’s destiny just as surely as one’s actions. When Smith and Bundick set fire after fire—sometimes several a night—the exhausted volunteer firefighters in Accomack County band together to stop the arsonists putting a match to their way of life. Hesse can do with a handful of words what other writers do with paragraphs, and as she traces the intersecting paths of the amateur arsonists and the authorities determined to capture them, she reveals that every crime has its own personal, sometimes inscrutable DNA. --Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review

About the Author

Monica Hesse is a feature writer for the Washington Post.  Winner of the Edgar Award and a finalist for a Livingston and James Beard Award, she is also the author of Girl in the Blue Coat. She lives in Washington, DC.

About this edition

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 1631494511
• ISBN 13: 9781631494512
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272