Joe Walker is now a fire marshal, having overcome a troubled background as a chubby kid bullied at school and at home. In SEEING RED, a warehouse fire requires his presence as arson is a possibility. That warehouse had been the scene of a tragic event thirteen years previously, when the girl he adored just escaped an earlier fire though her father was killed. Summer Abrams left San Diego to study and hasn't spoken to him since. This time however Joe has rescued her cat Socks, and Summer's coming in person to collect it.

Summer doesn't like commitments and is haunted by the fact that she couldn't avert the tragedy when she was just a gawky girl being chased by the boys. Looking at the debris today, she feels a panic attack begin, an unusual event for someone who organises wilderness adventures. The firefighters invite her to sit down. Then she gradually recognises Joe, dirty and scraped but hot as molten lava. Joe's in a relationship, one he never gets time to sustain, but even if he was single, Summer's hardly here to stay....

We get a tour of San Diego's Gaslamp Quarter, once apparently notorious but now renovated in Victorian style and given a cultural theme. Summer's mother runs an interior furnishings store here, and has got used to doing without help from her daughter, who realises that she doesn't have a place in the family anymore. Sometimes gaining what we want means losing what we didn't realise we had. Summer has promised to aid her mother while the fire is being investigated, but the staff resent her interference. Other than the cat, is there nobody who really needs her?

Jill Shalvis wrote SEEING RED in 2005 and it is being re- released with two other firefighter novels to bring it to a new readership. The popular author of the Lucky Harbor series and other romance novels includes a couple of excerpts at the end of SEEING RED. Her fans will be pleased to get a chance to read more from Jill and to learn about the work of tracing deliberately started fires as well as the secrets of the heart.