In Jim Kelly’s THE FIRE BABY, Maggie Beck makes a deathbed confession about an incident from 20 years earlier: a fiery plane crash in which the only two survivors were Maggie and a baby whose parents were killed in the impact. But it’s to whom Maggie confesses her secret that drives the novel: a woman named Laura, just awakening from a coma following her own horrific accident.

Laura’s husband Philip Dryden is a reporter who has to uncover the clues of this confession, since his wife can only speak with the aid of a computer setup, which she controls with her eyes. To go into the confession — part of which is revealed rather quickly — would be giving away a major spoiler. I would just feel awful to give away a key component to such a puzzle of a mystery.

But Kelly has also provided more mystery to the whole picture: a missing woman whose father just discovers has been made into an unwitting star of certain pornographic material. Then there is the discovery of a human trafficking that ties into it all, and the culprit behind the porn turning up brutally killed and left to rot, while the father of the missing girl goes missing himself, with most clues pointing at him as a killer.

That’s all just a small part to this gripping mystery, and Dryden does his best to piece all the clues together, all the while trying to decipher the printout his wife is painstakingly writing. Kelly has come through on all accounts with THE FIRE BABY, never tipping the readers as to who’s behind the killings and why, and pacing the novel slowly, as if one was peeling an onion. Under each layer, there is another secret to be explained, all leading to the final truth of that fateful night in 1976 and how it still affected people all these years later. —Bruce Grossman

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