Philip Dryden is a journalist near Cambridgeshire Fens in
England. His personal life has taken many paths that have
left him limited in his work life and even less so in his
personal life. Philip's wife Laura lies comatose in a
hospital bed after their horrible car crash into 20 feet of
water four years before. A ticker machine with a button
that Laura can press to select letters of the alphabet is
their only means of communication. Laura has managed to
have lucid moments where she can spell out a word or two,
while the rest of the tape reveals random letters, most
likely from muscle spasms or random firings in her brain.
Beside Laura in her hospital room lies Maggie Beck, a
personal friend to Philip's family. Maggie is dying from
cancer and asks Philip to find her daughter, who's on
holiday, so that Maggie can reveal a lie she's kept for 27
years. Philip leaves Maggie with a tape recorder while he
searches for her daughter. Twenty-seven years before, an
American plane crashed on Maggie's family's property
igniting fuel that burned up her family, including her two-
week-old baby. The only survivors were Maggie and an infant
boy, Lyndon, of an American family on the military plane.
Lyndon Koskinski has lived in Texas with his grandparents,
who sent Maggie pictures and letters while he grew up. Now,
Lyndon has returned to England as an American solider who
escaped from four weeks in a cell in Al Rasheid Baghdad
Hilton.
Before she dies, Maggie informs her daughter Estelle and
Lyndon that Lyndon is really her child Matty rescued from
his crib in the burning home and given to the Koskinski
family to keep him safe from her secrets. Philip promises
Maggie that he will find Matty's father. She left
stipulations with her lawyers, but there are more secrets
to tell Estelle. However, Maggie takes her last breath
before they are revealed. Her taped messages are the only
clues, but the last tape is missing.
Phillip investigates the details surrounding the fiery
crash all those years before while still doing his job as a
reporter. As Philip investigates the rape of a young girl
and her father's disappearance after going out to seek
revenge, he discovers many paths that cross. Philip
overcomes phobias and fear to seek the truth, putting
himself in danger's way. Meanwhile Laura, who listened to
Maggie as she confessed to the cassette recorder, tries
desperately to communicate with Philip on the ticker tape
machine before it's too late.
Jim Kelly's THE FIRE BABY was a refreshing read for
me. I became engrossed with the plot immediately and the
characters were so humanized that I could not put the book
down. I enjoyed the British colloquialisms and especially
the angst of a man in love with a wife who cannot respond
and the pain that their future together may be no more than
him holding her hand while she lies in a hospital bed. I
found Kelly's book to be simply stimulating.
An American plane crashes in a remote farm on England's
Cambridgeshire Fens. Out of the flames walks a young woman,
Maggie Beck, with a baby in her arms--the only two
survivors. Now, twenty-seven years later, Maggie is dying.
As she lies in the hospital, she give a startling deathbed
confession to the patient in the bed next to hers, Laura, a
woman slowly awakening from a coma. The confession would
blow open the murder case that Laura's husband, reporter
Philip Dryden, is covering... if only Laura could
communicate the shocking secrets she's learned.
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