Customer Reviews

Pyro

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Paul Wollf, Emerson's newest protagonist, is another superlative example of a deeply flawed individual who wins the reader's sympathy despite some character traits which, if Wolff were a real person, would make a sane person keep him at the proverbial barge pole's distance. But make no mistake, Emerson has not recreated his previous hero, Swope, in Wollf. Where Swope was a mindless womanizer, Wollf is a shy guy who knows he's not good enough for a good woman. Where Swope was a popular guy around the firehouse, Wollf holds the entire world at bay, his sternly leashed violence like a guard dog between him and his fellow creatures. But as in "Into the Inferno" Emerson does tell a thumping good action yarn all the while interlacing it with the hero's movement towards self-discovery. If Swope was the guy you hoped would be taking you home after the party, then Wollf is the guy you hope you're waking up with on a quiet Sunday morning.

As always, Emerson's well-honed descriptions and his ear for dialogue boost a story that in less gifted hands might end up merely workmanlike. Example: "I suck dark smoke all the way up. It tastes like the undercarriage of a fertilizer truck might." What an image! Makes me want a swig of Listerine bad!

Another plus for this author -- and some may disagree with me on this, but so what? They'll be wrong! -- is that he is so NOT afraid to stretch his skills, I mean really work at his craft, and the proof is in how he told this story from so many different points of view and still made the story cohesive and kept the flow of events and emotions constant. That can't have been easy, and it had to have been a conscious choice right from the beginning of the book.

I wish I wasn't going to have to wait another year or more for the next book by Earl Emerson. And I wish he'd do another book tour through the Midwest sometime! Why does the left coast get all the breaks?

Thanks, too, Mr. Emerson, for the opening quote from Elmer Slezak. I miss him!

I recently finished the book Pyro by Earl Emerson. If I had written this review right after I finished the book, it would have been average at best. But it's grown on me a bit over the last two days...

Lt. Paul Wollf is a firefighter in Seattle, and he can best be described as an excellent firefighter with anger and impulse management control issues. His father was also a firefighter and died in a fire that was set by a serial arsonist. The arsonist appears to be back after a 25 year absence, and Wollf is trying to figure out whether its the same guy who killed his father and now seems to want him dead. After his father died when he was young, his mom went to pieces, living with a number of lowlifes. One killed his mom, and his brother and him killed the killer. Due to bad representation, his brother ended up serving time for that murder, and that led to his anger issues. The two story lines blend together at the end when the arsonist and Wollf come face to face and he learns some truths he didn't realize.

The novel seems rather dark, and Wolff's fellow firefighters (especially his bosses) are all pretty dysfunctional. Some of the leadership behavior is so bad, I kept thinking 1) why?, and 2) this wouldn't be allowed to continue. As the book progresses, you start to understand some of the tension and interplay between Wollf and the bosses that causes all the conflict. I guess I didn't think much of it to start as I was expecting more action. But when I thought back on the characters and the interplay between them, I realized the book was a bit deeper than I originally gave it credit for.

As exciting as a police procedural, this novel is, instead, a "fireman's procedural," tracing the story of a fire lieutenant's death twenty-five years ago in an arson fire, the failed hunt for the pyromaniac who set it, and the "pyro's" possible return to action in Seattle during a spate of recent arsons. Twenty-nine-year-old Paul Wollf is the son of this lieutenant, who died when Wollf was only four, an event which destroyed his childhood. His mother, unable to cope, descended into depression and alcoholism and neglected the children. Six years later, they witnessed her murder by their stepfather, who was then murdered himself. When a string of recent arsons keeps the station busy all night for several nights in a row, Wolff notices an odd "signature" to the fires, the same "signature" that appeared at the fire that killed his father twenty-five years ago.

Determined to avenge his father's death, Wollf is often stymied by jealousies and bureaucracy within his own department. An angry man who has never been able to form close relationships, perhaps due to his traumatic past, Wollf has no one in whom he can confide. When his favorite film star of the past, the elderly Patricia Pennington, is the victim of one of these new fires, Wollf meets both her granddaughter and housekeeper, two women of markedly different temperaments, both of whom play key roles in the events which follow.

A probationary firefighter, a stationhouse veteran, Patricia Pennington's granddaughter, Wollf, and the "pyro" himself all tell the story in first-person accounts, broadening the focus and casting new light on Wollf, the inner workings of the fire department, and the madness of pyromania. Acutely psychological and intense in the search for the "pyro," the novel also sheds light on some of the reasons firemen are drawn to the job and the games some are willing to play in order acquire power.

For author Earl Emerson, himself a lieutenant in the Seattle Fire Department, realism is critical. Technical aspects of fighting fires, venting roofs, using fans to drive out smoke, handling ladders, and saving lives are fascinating, fully described, and completely integrated into this exciting story. The complexities of bureaucracy, the reality of public relations and publicity, and the difficulties of managing personal relationships are also part of the realism. A fast-paced action novel filled with dramatic fire-fighting scenes, the novel is a tribute to the heroic men and women who risk their lives daily. Mary Whipple

Earl Emerson splits his time between his real-life occupations - writing, and working as a firefighter in Washington state. And after a lengthy, successful detective series, he's turned to what he knows and has set his last several novels in the firefighter milieu.

I was pleasantly surprised by his Thomas Black private eye novels, mainly because I grew to like the characters so much. Even so, I've found his books to be frustrating reads. They tend to be full of hyper-quirky characters that do and say things that have absolutely no bearing on either story or plot (or what anyone would really do in a similar situation, for that matter).

This is the first of his firefighter novels I've read. And I can't get into it at all, for a lot of the same reasons.

Emerson should know his stuff. Here, everything seems right; the accuracy is all there from a technical standpoint, and who better to write about firefighting than a real life firefighter. But this is the deal: you can feel Emerson hiding behind the writing, working hard to craft his twisty-turny plots and his goofy characters. With Pyro, he splits the narrative into (so far) seemingly half a dozen different points of view, which completely distracts from the flow of the book. You need a scorecard to keep track of who's who.

Drives me crazy. But I struggle on, `cause Emerson's such a likeable mug. Maybe someday I'll actually get around to finishing it...

I sent it to my son when he was in Afghanistan. We're both fans of Emerson

Having recently read and loved Earl Emerson's Smoke Room, I went directly on to a previous book, Pyro. Like Smoke Room, Pyro is a stand-alone suspense novel that takes place in and around a fire station. Unlike Smoke Room, the story has multiple narrators and a more widely focused plot that, while still suspenseful, doesn't reach the claustrophobic, near unbearable, oh-my-god-how-is-he-going-to-get-out-of-this levels that Smoke Room did.

There's a nuisance arsonist plaguing the area around Seattle's Station Six, driving all the firefighters mad with multiple nightly calls, but Lt. Paul Wolff has a special hatred for the perpetrator as his father was killed in an arson fire when he was just a kid, and his surviving family went on a downward spiral that they still feel the effects of--Paul may be the "success story" of the family, with an alcoholic murdered mother and a brother in prison, but he's still dangerously unstable emotionally, even if he keeps it well under wraps.

The arsonist's attention seems to be more and more personal, though, seeming to center on Station Six and possibly even on Paul Wolff. The unthinkable slowly begins to seem possible--is this arsonist the very same one who took the life of his father and is now knowingly toying with him? And if he is, what will Wolff do if and when the man is caught?

Emerson, a professional firefighter himself, fills the book with authentic details of firefighting techniques and every day station life and politics that add a dimension to the story beyond the mere suspense plot, and that's one of the things that has attracted me to his books. In Pyro, the narration moves from Wolff to other characters, most notably a female trainee under him who is doing her best to prove her worth and get through her probationary period, but who is being plotted against by supervisors without her knowledge. This plot was almost as intriguing to me as the main story and made me wonder what the inspiration for it might have been in Emerson's real life career.

The multiple viewpoints made things interesting but as I said, somewhat less focused, and I didn't find the fairly stereotypical psycho bad guy nearly as compelling as the good-guys-gone-bad in Smoke Room, but on its own this novel remains a very good read with interesting characters and a page-turning plot. Definitely worth a look!

I have long been a fan of Earl Emerson and am very excited that he has broadened his style. This book is a thriller that I found hard to put down. While written in the style of several different characters point of view the story still maintains velocity and suspense. My heart is still pounding after the book finishes with a very satisfying end that does not compromise the main character. I could almost feel the flames on my face and hear the crackling of a building burning down. Like any exhilarting ride the only downside is that it comes to an end too quickly.

I just started reading Earl Emerson's books, which involve Firefighters and I became immediately hooked. His books are real page turners, with lots of plot twists. The characters are all pretty realistic with their human flaws. Having recently graduated from the Fire Academy, Pyro was even more interesting for me, because one of the main characters is a female firefighter who is also a new recruit. Earl Emerson's books are well written and entertaining.

Emerson's characters have always been memorable, one of the strengths of his writing. However, in the serial characters of Thomas Black and Mac Fontana, the stories were largely propelled by events outside the characters themselves. In stepping away from that world into the stand-alone novels he's writing now, Emerson's skill in characterization comes to the fore. Always tightly woven and skillfully plotted, now his novels are driven by the characters themselves, their daily lives, their histories, their traumas, their coping skills (or lack thereof). As a result, what were enjoyable, fun, well-done if typical genre novels have become riveting and intense tales in their own right.

I'm particularly impressed with "Pyro." Paul Wollf is as believable and real as his past is--traumatic and horrific as it turns out to be. It's particularly impressive that Emerson doesn't try to make his characters "nice" or apologize for their flaws. He simply turns them loose and lets the chips fall where they may, and tells the story as it follows. While I originally found the multiple points of view distracting, they were so skillfully handled by Lt. Emerson that it didn't take more than a section or two before each character's insight became indispensible to properly telling the tale. One or two twists concerning the protagonist, Paul Wollf, became obvious to me early on, twists that weren't actually explained until towards the end of the novel. But I don't believe they were meant to be hidden--and what I thought I knew only increased the tension and kept me even more riveted to the story.

There aren't many books I "can't" put down, but this was one I had to stick with until the end--which was about 1:15 a.m last night. I've read and enjoyed all of Lt. Emerson's other books, and I won't be unhappy if he does decide to return to the worlds of Mac Fontana and Thomas Black in the future. But "Pyro" stands head and shoulders above the others--though "Into the Inferno" is close beside it.

I found Lt. Emerson's novels because of a fondness for mysteries and a fascination with firefighting and firefighters; I've stayed because he tells a damn good tale. He states on his website that he made the decision to step away from the "tried and true" formula of his series characters into the world of "stand alone" thrillers to challenge himself as a writer. In "Pyro," he's not only met the challenge, he's exceeded it.

This is my first experience with Earl Emerson's world - and it was a bit creepy. Emerson has a master's touch in describing the somewhat unbalanced.

Paul Wolff is a firefighter with a past and an attitude. He and his brother, when they were 10 and 13 respectively, witnessed the murder of their mother by her boyfriend. Paul's brother is started on a long path of incarceration, being blamed for the shooting death of the boyfriend.

Paul joins the fire department and is haunted by the ghost of his father, a firefighter killed in a fire 19 years before. His father's death precipitated his mother's slide into depression and alcoholism.

Paul is loner in the fire department. Moved from the station to station (the result of punching out a chief), he doesn't make friends. He doesn't want friends.

Seattle is swamped with a wave of arsons. Paul cannot stop thinking of his father who died in an arsonist's fire. Possessed of a violent temper and physical strength and skill, Wolff is not a man to be tinkered with. But he is brave, honest and compassionate.

A host of disordered characters populate these pages. Eddings, the lesbian battalion chief who has it in for female probationer Cindy Rideout, whom Wolff has taken under his wing. Slaughter, commander of the other squad in the station house who seems to have it in for Paul Wolff. Hertlein, the bullying chief knocked out by Paul, whose sanity seems in question.

And then there's Earl Ward, the arsonist who has returned to Seattle after 25 years in prison.

Not everyone in the book is wacko. But the exceptions are few.

Emerson's characters are richly drawn: they are believable and for the most part, frightening. His plot rolls along without a single hiccup.

Emerson's universe is weird, but engrossing.

Jerry