SETTING FIRES

A middle-aged woman explores the origins of a fire that guts the family’s weekend home—and comes to grips with the death of her father.

Annie Waldmas seems to have everything. A 40-year-old documentary filmmaker, she’s married to a photo researcher for the New York Times, has two smart, adorable children, lives on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and has enough disposable income to afford a summer home in Connecticut. But when Wenner’s story opens, the family’s summer place has just gone up in smoke, the result of what the authorities call an electrical fire. To make matters worse, Annie’s controlling father, who lives on the West Coast, has just been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Annie has had her ups and downs with her father, as have her two brothers and sister, but love now wins win out, and she finds herself shuttling back and forth across the continent first to bond, then to care for her dying father. Meanwhile, she suspects that the fire could have been arson, possibly set by an anti-Semite who may be burning a swath through other nearby New England towns. But the real fires in this well-told family saga are not those that destroy wood, brick, and mortar, but those that rage in the hearts and minds of a woman struggling to make sense of a world where loss seems arbitrary and capricious. At times, the account of Annie’s father’s embrace of his imminent death—and her attempt to come to accept his loss—threatens to overcome the somewhat less interesting matter of solving a possible hate crime, but Wenner, a former 20/20 TV journalist, manages to keep things on track.

Wenner is a skilled writer who weaves an entertaining debut tale while offering a truthful and touching portrait of a family held together—and torn apart—by guilt and lies.