California fire life

Jack Wade is the best arson investigator California Fire and Life Mutual has ever had. He knows fire and can read the traces it leaves behind like a roadmap. Fires talk to him, tell him how they started, what they did. Pamela Vale has died in a fire at her home and Wade is sent to investigate the usual claim her husband has filed on the very morning her charred body is found in the rubble. The tracks of the fire tell Jack Wade that something's wrong. So wrong he violates his own cardinal rule ("Don't get involved") and plunges into the case. Now his expert knowledge and defiant integrity may be the only things that can keep the investigation from being snuffed out, and keep him alive...