St. Alban's Fire A Joe Gunther Novel [Paperback]

With Joe Gunther and his Vermont Bureau of Investigation team spread thin on assignment everywhere, from the remote dairy county of Northwest Vermont to the slums of Newark, NJ, they're pushed to their absolute limit when a string of serial arsons across the Green Mountain State evolve into the most shocking series of murders the bucolic region has ever known.

There are few more frightening discoveries than the odor of something burning in a hay loft. A farmers nightmares are full of fire, from a carelessly tossed match, to a spark from a worn electrical wire, to a fluke bolt of lightening. Even the hay itself, if put up too damp and packed too tightly, can spontaneously ignite and bring about disaster. More than one farmer in Bobbys experience, Calvin Cutts included, wrapped up every day before bed by giving the barn a final fire check. To say that such vigilance smacked of paranoia was to miss the larger point: fire to a farmer was like a diagnosis of cancersurvivable perhaps, but only following a long and crippled struggle, and only if you were lucky.

Bobby had two choices: to investigate and perhaps stifle a problem before it got worse, or to run back to the house, raise the alarm, and get as many people and equipment coming as possible.

Typically, sadly, and unsurprisingly, he yielded to a young mans faith in his own abilities, and set out to discover what was wrong.

Bobbys sense of smell led him away from the bales and toward the sealed off, so-called fuel room that Calvin had built as far from any flammable materials as possible. Here was kept the gas and oil and diesel for their machines, locked behind a heavy, wooden door.

He could hear more clearly now, as he approached that door, the hissing sound that had drawn his attention. But as he unhooked the key from a nearby post, and freed the fire extinguisher carefully placed beneath it, he remained convinced of his course of action. It was a closed room; whatever lay within it wlsŒ