Fire Marker Man (ePub)

In Flower's fast-paced debut, an Irish immigrant faces the promise, corruption, and danger of life as a New York City fireman in the days before the Civil War, when gangs ruled the squalid streets of the Five Points, and competing demand insurance payment from building owners before unleashing their pumps and hoses in a crisis. Robert Gillian and his wife and children fled the famine in Ireland for the U.S. in 1847, and soon Gillian's a volunteer at Engine Company 5, a position that doesn't pay a salary but offers respect and opportunity-as Gillian puts it, he'll receive "notice of the best jobs in town for an Irishman." Soon, he's a local hero for his rescue of a woman from a burning tenement, but a discomfiting darkness looms over Gillian's ascent, especially as he's drawn into the world (and wealth and business practices) of the mysterious Fire Marker Man.

A framing device cues readers to be on guard. The novel opens in 1869, with Gillian imprisoned in New York's infamous Tombs, refusing offers of legal help, and expressing dismay at his son's eagerness to become a fireman himself. Dark hints about Gillian's possible crime-and his apparent sense of guilt-shade the main body of the story, an exciting tour through 19th century New York that's attentive to changing times and the technology of firefighting and mill work, plus a sweeping range of class stations and the looming inevitability of what some characters call "Lincoln's war."

For all the arresting period detail, the storytelling is swift, and Flower's interest is in morality, especially as the story bends, perhaps inevitably, toward murder, arson, and Gillian's fear that "'working for the Fire Marker Man,' meant, quite bluntly, 'becoming an arsonist.'" Readers of historical dramas will be fascinated by the question of what it takes to succeed in a brutal, money-mad society like Gillian's-and what exactly is the state of his soul.