title: American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land
author:  Monica Hesse 
description: <strong><a href="//www.amazon.com/b/?node=390919011">An Amazon Best Book of July 2017:</a></strong> A passionate love affair is often described as an inferno, but in 2012 and 2013, boyfriend and girlfriend Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick turned the metaphor into reality as they lit 70-plus fires in derelict buildings across Virginias Accomack County. Monica Hesses spare but memorable prose sketches the true story of a once-prosperous county now in sharp economic decline, its derelict buildings easy targets for Smith and Bundick. But Accomack Countys plunging fortunes is the simplistic explanation for the arson epidemic, and Hesse pushes that aside to plumb the complicated personal relationships, the tight-knit community, and the stories told in small towns that can shape a persons destiny just as surely as ones actions. When Smith and Bundick set fire after firesometimes several a nightthe exhausted volunteer firefighters in Accomack County band together to stop the arsonists putting a match to their way of life. Hesse can do with a handful of words what other writers do with paragraphs, and as she traces the intersecting paths of the amateur arsonists and the authorities determined to capture them, she reveals that every crime has its own personal, sometimes inscrutable DNA. <em>--Adrian Liang, The Amazon Book Review</em>
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  LAND OF FIRE
  
  
  
  Derek Birks
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright (C) Derek Birks 2021.
  
  
  
  Derek Birks has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents
  Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
  
  
  
  First published in 2021 by Sharpe Books.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For my warm-hearted sister-in-law Maggie who was a constant supporter and
  advocate of my writing and who is greatly missed by all her family.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either
  the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any
  resemblance to any persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Table of Contents
  
  
  
  [ Map ](text00005.html#_Toc70060593)
  
  [ Part One: Iron Hill ](text00006.html#_Toc70060594)
  
  [ Part Two: Vindocladia ](text00007.html#_Toc70060595)
  
  [ Part Three: Kinfolk ](text00008.html#_Toc70060596)
  
  [ Part Four: War ](text00009.html#_Toc70060597)
  
  [ Part Five: Fate ](text00010.html#_Toc70060598)
  
  [ A Note about Placenames ](text00011.htm