Henry Christie used to be a police detective in the tacky seaside city of Blackpool. Having retired with all his limbs, he now runs the Tawny Owl Inn on exposed moorland in North Lancashire. Dry weather has left him at risk of WILDFIRE. That’s not the only risk he faces in this jagged thriller by Nick Oldham, a former police officer.

The start sees DCI Christie spotting suspicious behaviour in 2009 – another officer doesn’t respond to her phone or attend an autopsy. He goes to perform a welfare check and stumbles into something bad. That returns to haunt him later, in this modern-day story.

DC Diane Daniels is first on the scene of a gas explosion at the house of a young mother. The fire investigators find evidence that fires were set and the death was not accidental. Even as the detective works the case, she is drawn into a much bigger scenario of organised crime, with a drug turf war starting in Blackpool and spilling out to the whole county.

Meanwhile, Diane’s retired friend Christie is feeding the firefighters for free at the inn, where local firefighting coordination is based. Since a family doesn’t answer the phone alert, he decides to perform a welfare check on their remote farmhouse – you guessed it, bad news again. The action is just getting started.

The wildfires and their smoke are ever-present but not the main source of threat during the crime story. Murder, violent abuse and ongoing intimidation are unrelenting. These criminals think little about shooting at police officers, killing accomplices and seeking revenge. The revenge part is really what drives the action, as Christie learns the hard way that you can try to leave the past but it doesn’t leave you.

I previously read one of the Henry Christie series, Death Ride, and felt a major impact from the gritty tale. This story WILDFIRE precedes it, and it’s not a great order to read the books, as I was meeting people who are, gulp, not treated well in the later story. I recognised one location immediately and was wondering if this was before or after… and then I found out, and just decided not to try getting to know those nice people. I don’t know why Nick Oldham feels the need to keep upping the personal stakes for Christie, but it’s easy to see that, like John Rebus in Edinburgh, this fictional detective will never really get to retire. Readers who are seasoned crime fans will find Wildfire hard to put down.