Firestorm by Nevada Barr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"Raw, naked power blooming in red and orange and black. Tornadoes of pure fire shrieking through the treetops, an enraged elemental beast slaking a hunger so old only stones and gods remembered."

Firestorm (1996) is my fourth book by Nevada Barr in her National Parks series featuring Anna Pigeon, the ranger. After Glacier, Carlsbad Caverns, and Mesa Verde, Ms. Pigeon is now serving in Lassen Volcanic National Park as an emergency medical technician helping battle the ferocious Jackknife fire that blazes in that Northern California park.

Ms. Pigeon has been on the front line tending to firefighters wounds and bruises; when the spike camp is in the final stages of disassembly she gets a message about a medical emergency. One of the firefighters has suffered a complicated knee fracture on a steep slope and needs to be evacuated up the hill to a helicopter landing spot. Ms. Pigeon along with a few other firefighters and medical crew embark on the rescue mission and this is when they are trapped by a monster firestorm. They barely survive the hellish flames only to encounter a several-day-long period of catastrophic weather that makes rescue from outside impossible. Not only does the group include severely wounded people and victims of second-degree burns but also - guess what - they discover a murder victim and it is clear that the murderer must be among them. There are even signs that someone has tampered with the crime scene.

Like in Blood Lure and in Blind Descent the "nature" part of the story is superb while the criminal thread is weak. In Firestorm the contrast is particularly strong; I feel I am reading two different books: a great one about the wildfire inferno, about the nature dying and being reborn in the flames, and a mediocre crime story full of fake and unnecessary clues. A compelling portrayal of firefighters' lives on the fire frontline, complicated relationships in the camps, and the government bureaucracy of the National Parks Service and BLM are combined with amateurish, implausible, and just plain laughable investigation that Ms. Pigeon is conducting among the firefighting crew.

We again meet Frederick Stanton, a powerful FBI agent, and Ms. Pigeon's romantic interest. His character is not well developed and the reader will feel his main role in the plot is to produce information about crime suspects, which Ms. Pigeon is then using in her ruminations about who the guilty party is. Other characters' portrayals range from well-drawn to pure caricatures. Ms. Barr's prose is clearly better than in Ill Wind, still a bit florid, but the reader quickly gets accustomed to it.

I really, really like the non-crime part of the novel and wouldn't hesitate to rate it with four stars. I really, really dislike the "investigation" part and would rate it with four times fewer stars. Overall, I certainly recommend the book and readers interested in classical whodunits might like it much more than I do.

Three stars.

View all my reviews