From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble Review
The first volume in a projected series, Suzanne Chazin's
The Fourth Angel marks the debut of a potentially significant new voice. An intricately plotted account of murder, bureaucratic infighting, and serial arson, Chazin's novel illuminates the world of the professional firefighter with unobtrusive authority and the narrative facility of a born storyteller.
The heroine of The Fourth Angel is Georgia Skeehan, a rookie fire marshal for the New York City Fire Department (FDNY). A former firefighter, Georgia is the daughter of an FDNY hero who died in the line of duty. She is also a struggling single mother and a token female in an insular, traditionally male profession. Her already complicated life takes on a whole new level of complexity when she finds herself investigating, at considerable personal risk, a series of spectacularly destructive fires.
The novel begins with a graphic account of one of those fires, an eight-alarm blaze that destroys an entire office building in minutes, reaching an unprecedented temperature of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit and claiming more than 50 lives. Subsequent investigation reveals that a high-temperature accelerant (HTA) triggered the fire. (HTAs are highly specialized, extremely powerful accelerants roughly equivalent to rocket fuel.) Shortly afterward, Georgia learns that at least three other HTA-related fires have occurred in New York within the past few months. She also learns that the fires were accompanied by enigmatic letters invoking a fiery biblical figure from the Book of Revelations: the Fourth Angel.
Georgia's search for the Fourth Angel leads in several directions at once. One involves the wealthy industrialist whose building burned down in the opening sequence. Another concerns a resentful former FDNY dispatcher, a man with a grudge against the entire firefighting profession. A third involves a conspiracy of silence within the FDNY itself and points to the possible complicity of several fellow officers. In the end, Georgia uncovers a number of related solutions, then finds herself caught up in a frantic, race-against-time attempt to prevent a final, cataclysmic conflagration.
Although certain aspects of her story strain credibility, Chazin manages to hold things together with impressive narrative assurance. Her forensic expertise, her familiarity with the inner workings of a big-city fire department, her ability to convey the day-to-day stresses of a uniquely dangerous profession -- all of these elements coalesce to form a tense, cohesive melodrama that disturbs, enlightens, and entertains. (Bill Sheehan)
Bill Sheehan reviews horror, suspense, and science fiction for Cemetery Dance, The New York Review of Science Fiction, and other publications. His book-length critical study of the fiction of Peter Straub, At the Foot of the Story Tree, has been published by Subterranean Press (www.subterraneanpress.com).
From The Critics
Will do for firefighting what Patricia Cornwell did for forensic science.
Chicago Tribune
It's always a treat to see a debut novel explore new territory, and that's exactly what happens in The Fourth Angel.
Lee Child
Will do for firefighting what Patricia Cornwell did for forensic science.
People
...Chazin dazzles with her knowledge of pyrotechnics and comes up with plot twists aplenty...
USA Today
A red hot debut.
USA Today
A red-hot debut novel...a searing, emotionally explosive novel of heroism, love and desperate acts.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
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. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Appealing first fiction about a scrappy single mom, a freshly appointed New York City Fire Marshal, whose dedication to the truth about a quartet of arson fires takes her to the highest levels of her own department—and into her own conflicted psyche. Georgia Skeehan's most formidable (and fully realized) antagonists here are her own memories, plus the guilt and fear they inspire. Years before, while attempting to rescue a downed firefighter, she believes she"finked out" and left him to die. Her courage and her ability to serve as a competent fire marshal are therefore always subjects of internal debate. When a string of unusual fires light up a handful of warehouses in Manhattan, Skeehan immediately suspects the cause is High Temperature Accelerant (HTA), a lethal combination of hardware chemicals that if burned can melt cement. The higher-ups will have none of this, though, until the intervention of Commissioner Lynch, who names Skeehan to the investigative team. Her colleagues resist her theories, but her troublesome habit of being right keeps the egg dripping from their faces. Meanwhile, a developing love interest tests Skeehan's capacity to trust a man again. With a feint toward a conclusion to the mystery about two-thirds through, author Chazin keeps the plot fueled by letting on that the arsonist—an unthreatening and dimly realized character at best—doesn't know the half of what he's doing. Larger forces are at work. After Skeehan pulls off the stunning feat of making it downtown from a midtown hospital bed at rush hour, finding a secret bomb, rescuing a child and leading her own to safety; and getting a blunt confession from a family friend in37minutes,the bad guys get their due, departmental corruption continues on its way, and our heroine might be able to love again. A nicely plotted mixture of detective work and personal growth that generates companionable, if not heated, interest for the reader.
