Consuming Fire

DAVIS, THOMAS D.

ISBN 10: 0312145756 / ISBN 13: 9780312145750

Published by ST. MARTIN'S, N.Y., 1996

About this Item

AS NEW IN DJ.

Seller Inventory # 844

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Consuming Fire
• Publisher: ST. MARTIN'S, N.Y.
• Publication Date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312145756
• ISBN 13: 9780312145750
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Dust Jacket Condition: Dust Jacket Included
• Seller catalogs:
  • Mystery

About this title

Synopsis

P.I. Dave Strickland is called to Granite Valley, California, to investigate anonymous threats against John Havens, a local author of a book on grief and healing. At first, the case seems unrelated to a series of murders that have taken place in the area: Over the past eight months, three children have been kidnapped, knocked out, and burned to death. However, Strickland no sooner arrives in Granite galley than there is a radical change in the scope of his investigation - an anonymous caller has accused Havens of the child murders.
While Strickland is trying to uncover any leads regarding the death threats, a fourth child is found murdered. Because he is on-site when the remains are found, the case becomes all too personal for Strickland, who must now sort through the confusing evidence if he has any chance of stopping the madman's rampage.

Reviews

Another bout of empathetic misery for the most depressive detective in contemporary fiction. This time Dave Strickland, still convalescing from the savage attack he survived in Murdered Sleep (1994), is hired to track down the person who's been making anonymous threats against John Havens, the Santa Cruz ad agent who turned grief counselor after his son Ricky was killed in an apartment fire. Havens's current support group includes the parents of two children who've been kidnapped and burned to death, and the notes and calls he's been getting imply, hideously, that the group has been sacrificing its own children. None of the parents are eager to talk to Dave--there's a particularly painful scene with a father who's withdrawn from the group and from his own life into the stillness of deep mourning- -and Dave's only hope of opening them up is sharing his own unquenchable grief over the deaths of his daughter (SIDS) and wife (suicide). To leaven the mix, Davis adds an ex-con arsonist Dave had helped put away and a local female cop who'd switched years ago to women after her two-night stand with Dave, but they don't do much to lighten this vale of tears, or to strengthen the twisted, implausible plot. Davis's spiritual bloodbaths, in which murder merely sets the stage for the real suffering, aren't for everybody. But readers who aren't afraid to burrow deep into Dave and the others will find that no genre writer but P.D. James takes death more seriously. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.