Full name: American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

Author: Monica Hesse Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: True crime, Non Fiction, Mystery, Crime, History Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9781631490514 1631490516

Shocked by a five-month arson spree that left rural Virginia reeling, Washington Post reporter Monica Hesse drove down to Accomack County to cover the trial of Charlie Smith, who pled guilty to sixty-seven counts of arson. But Charlie wasn't lighting fires alone: he had an accomplice, his girlfriend Tonya Bundick. Through her depiction of the dangerous shift that happened in their passionate relationship, Hesse brilliantly brings to life the once-thriving coastal community and its distressed inhabitants, who had already been decimated by a punishing economy before they were terrified by a string of fires they could not explain. Incorporating this drama into the long-overlooked history of arson in the United States, American Fire re-creates the anguished nights that this quiet county spent lit up in flames, mesmerizingly evoking a microcosm of rural America - a land half gutted before the fires even began. Similar books: Norco '80 by Peter Houlahan Fire Lover by Joseph Wambaugh The Good Nurse by Charles Graeber The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark Seal American Predator by Maureen Callahan A False Report by T. Christian Miller The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann The Cases That Haunt Us by John Douglas The Onion Field by Joseph Wambaugh Devil's Knot by Mara Leveritt Wicked Beyond Belief by Michael Bilton Low Life by Luc Sante Highway of Tears by Jessica McDiarmid Midnight in Peking by Paul French Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan Fire in a Canebrake by Laura Wexler Till Death Us Do Part by Vincent Bugliosi Casino by Nicholas Pileggi Big Trouble by J. Anthony Lukas