Fire 5 is no ordinary fire company. It's a special roving unit, dispatched wherever trouble is worst across the city. And the men of Fire 5 are no ordinary crew.
Narrator Charly Sprockett introduces them one by one: the veterans and the probies, the brawlers and the philosophers, the men swapping funny stories and marital woes between calls. There's the unit's first female firefighter, Lulu Ann Tompkins, whose arrival upends the station's carefully maintained chaos. And there's the new battalion chief, H. Walker Slater, a tyrant so thoroughly despised that he unites the entire crew in a way nothing else could.
The calls come fast and unpredictably. A four-hundred-pound woman stuck in her bathtub. A desperate young girl threatening to jump from a freeway overpass. Burning buildings with people trapped inside. Through it all, Olsen captures the gallows humor, the genuine heroism, and the bone-deep camaraderie of men and women who run toward the fire everyone else is running from.
But beneath the ribald humor and the brotherhood lies something darker. Somewhere in the city, a vicious arsonist is pouring gasoline over derelicts and setting them ablaze. And Fire 5 is going to find him.
Funny, tense, and populated with characters as vivid and specific as any Jack Olsen ever created, The Secret of Fire Five is the kind of novel that reminds you why you loved reading in the first place.
Sonnet 4.6 Low
