The Fire Line

About

The Kestrel Fire burned 40,632 acres of Madrone County, destroyed 913 homes and killed twelve adults. Cause-and-origin investigator Mara Venn can still reduce all of that to two squares of dirt, 1.7 miles apart, and one report due before the county decides whom to blame. Mara is forty-two, a former hotshot who now walks burns backward from the least-damaged edge. At 1:42 p.m. on the third day of a wind event, worn hardware let energized conductors strike on Sierra Meridian Electric's Circuit 27. At 2:06, somebody started a second fire beside the Navarro orchard. By 2:31 the heads had joined. The utility had deferred an $18,400 repair; the county had failed to fuel the clinic generator; and nineteen-year-old firefighter Eli Navarro was photographed where the second fire began. At every examination stands Livia Sanz, the utility's technically excellent investigator, entitled to see what Mara sees and the best company Mara has had in years. Arson detective Cal Rusk needs a name before Friday's board meeting. Public adjuster June Pike represents thirty-seven households for ten percent of their recovery, including five families with no active policy. Rosa Navarro thought she had bought coverage from the state pool. The unpaid premium on her kitchen table says otherwise. The Fire Line is an adult procedural drama about evidence, liability and the difference between a true sentence and a whole truth. Nineteen choices alter the physical case, the utility's exposure, the county's pressure, Mara's certainty and the trust between two investigators on opposite payrolls. Five endings decide who pays, who is charged, and what remains when a defensible report becomes the only story a burned county is willing to read.

Content notice

• fatal wildfire and burned homes
• graphic post-fire remains
• grief and survivor guilt
• insurance non-renewal and threatened homelessness
• corporate and government negligence
• criminal jeopardy for a nineteen-year-old adult
• alcohol use
• sexual intimacy implied, cuts away
• violence discussed without instructional detail
• bigotry shown only through behaviour and consequence; no slurs written out

Cast

• M Mara Venn protagonist; Madrone County wildfire cause-and-origin investigator; former hotshot no portrait yet
• L Livia Sanz Sierra Meridian Electric senior fire investigator; Mara's professional equal and romantic counterpart no portrait yet
• C Cal Rusk Madrone County arson detective no portrait yet
• J June Pike licensed public adjuster representing thirty-seven burned households no portrait yet
• E Eli Navarro nineteen-year-old adult seasonal firefighter; Rosa's grandson no portrait yet
• R Rosa Navarro orchard owner; Eli's grandmother; uninsured after non-renewal no portrait yet
• A Ansel Rhee Sierra Meridian Electric grid incident commander no portrait yet
• I Iona Vale Madrone County district attorney no portrait yet