“Hooper drops the reader inside the Black Saturday brushfires to terrifying effect, then masterfully shifts from the physical realm to the existential-namely, how and why a particular evil manifests. The command of fire has defined and sustained us as a species-understanding its abuse will shape our future.Ī powerful true-crime thriller written with Hooper's trademark lyric detail and nuance, The Arsonist is a reminder that in an age of fire, all of us are gatekeepers. This book is also the story of fire in Australia, and of a community that owed its existence to that very element. The Arsonist takes readers on the hunt for this man, and inside the strange puzzle of his mind. But the detectives soon found themselves on the trail of a man they didn't know. In the Valley, where the rates of crime were the highest in the state, more than thirty people were known to the police as firebugs. On the scorching February day in 2009 that became known as Black Saturday, a man lit two fires in Victoria's Latrobe Valley, then sat on the roof of his house to watch the inferno. The book tells the story of the 2009 Black Saturday blazes in Victoria, which rank among Australia’s most deadly bushfires with 173 people killed and 450,000 hectares burned. What kind of person would deliberately start a firestorm? What kind of mind? Hooper and I sat down on a living room couch between tall stacked bookshelves to talk about her 2018 Australian release The Arsonist: A Mind on Fire. The true story of the most devastating wildfire in Australian history and the search for the man who started it.
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