Fourth Angel [Hardcover]

Suzanne Chazin's harrowing thriller follows rookie fire marshal Georgia Skeehan's efforts to solve a series of baffling high temperature fires that look to her like the work of a serial arsonist. The blazes have already incinerated more than 60 victims and threaten to claim the careers of many of Georgia's colleagues.

Still suffering guilt over her failure to save her partner in an earlier fire, Georgia knows she won't win any popularity contests when she's promoted over more senior members of the department and put in charge of the investigation. There are plenty of reasons for their resentment. Not only is she a woman in a milieu that's still determinedly masculine, but she's also too dedicated to the department's mission to comply with the code of silence that's concealed the fact that these seemingly unrelated fires are not only connected but may have been started by someone inside the NYFD. It takes a long time for Skeehan to trace the relationship between the self-styled Fourth Angel--the madman who announces his intentions in letters rife with biblical allusions--and the real perpetrator of the arsons. Before she gets to the bottom of things the reader is drawn into the backroom politics of the department, the unimaginable bravery as well as the locker room bravado of its members, and the technical details of how to reduce a skyscraper to ashes with ingredients almost anyone can assemble.

The wife of a NYFD firefighter, Chazin's access to the firehouse culture and firefighting technique gives this well-written story its verisimilitude. Her skills at character development make Georgia a complex heroine who can carry the series her creator expects to build on this debut. --Jane Adams

First-time novelist Chazin dramatizes her husband's real-life firefighting vocation in what Putnam is eagerly touting as a new series, with the adage, "He fights them, she writes them." At the start of this straightforward first thriller, fire marshal and single mom Georgia Skeehan is shanghaied onto the fire commissioner's special task force to investigate a string of suspicious, superhot fires so destructive they can melt steel and fuse concrete into glass. Thrown headlong into the cutthroat world of New York Fire Department politics, Skeehan (the lone female firefighter in the department) spunkily stands up to her sneering male colleagues and gives them something to chew on when she unearths evidence of a coverup connected to the fires within the department. Unassisted by her kvetching, retirement-age partner, she networks with contacts within the firefighting community, from Jimmy Gallagher, the strapping smoke-eater whom her live-in mother is dating, to Walter Frankel, a wheelchair-bound forensics expert. Is the arsonist really an FDNY employee, or is a slick, philanthropic real estate millionaire involved? Skeehan's worst fears are confirmed when a blaze engulfs a building next to a firehouse while all its firefighters are getting sloshed at a keg party off-premises. Her contacts begin turning up dead, and she herself becomes a target. Chazin's depiction of the rough Irish-Italian world of the FDNY is informative, and her descriptions of a superhot fire's potential for destruction in crowded New York City are frighteningly vivid. Her gradual revelation of a harrowing event in Georgia's past is convincing and makes up for more shallow portraits of supporting characters. With time and seasoning, Skeehan could prove to be a refreshing new face in the growing legion of female investigators. Agent, Matt Bialer.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.