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Product Description
Summer, 1976. A plane crashes on a farm in the Cambridgeshire fens. Out of the flames walks young Maggie Beck, clutching a baby in her arms.
Twenty-seven years later, investigative journalist Philip Dryden - visiting his wife, Laura, in hospital - is witness to Maggie's deathbed confession. But some secrets are best kept secret, and what started out for Dryden as a small and curious story about the only survivor of an almost-forgotten plane crash soon escalates into a full-blown murder investigation. And while Dryden is wondering what other secrets Maggie carried, his semi-conscious wife is trying to tell him something that might just save his life...
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Customer Reviews
It isn't just Dryden, but the characters around him who make the books something special - the friendship between Dryden and Humph the taxi-driver is developed further, as is the story of Dryden's relationship with his wife, in a coma in a hospital bed. I did worry that the coma would become a very static part of Dryden's back-story, but Kelly uses all of his elements to great effect, not only as character traits and influences, but as part of a plot that moves forward at a great pace, twisting and turning before reaching a skillfull and dramatic finale. And of course the Fen landscape is as much a character as any of the people, reflecting and heightening the mood and darkness of the story.
'The Fire Baby' confirms that Kelly has created a series character with the potential to grow. I for one hope there will be many more outings for Dryden and the other characters in this wonderful series.
The plot revolves around Philip Dryden, a slightly world-weary ex-Fleet Street journalist now earning a living writing for Ely’s ‘The Crow’. The two people he spends most time with are his wife – who happens to be in a coma and Humph, who’s almost in a coma too for the amount he manages to communicate. Humph is the hilariously taciturn cab driver permanently on call to ferry Dryden around the Fens – and he alone is reason enough to read the book.
There are multiple strands to the plot – including people smuggling, the peddling of pornography and the secrets of a woman who lost her infant many years before in the inferno caused by a US Air Force plane crashing on to her farm. Now on her death bed – and in the same room as Dryden’s wife – she decides that it’s time to finally come clean about what really happened on the night the plane plummeted from the sky. The result is that she sets off a chain of events with increasingly violent consequences.
Kelly has produced a first rate thriller here, but what I loved about the book most were the many poetic turns of phrase – used to great effect in evoking the atmosphere of the brooding and mysterious Fens landscape.
At first I wondered about the way the central theme, the story of the baby saved from the plane crash, could be linked to the secondary themes (pornography and illegal immigrants) without making it all too false and contrived, but it has been managed. Everything to do with the baby is intriguing and Kelly nicely builds up the layers and adds a few twists.
I have now bought the prequel to the book, The Water Clock, and am about to take it into the bath with me. The Fire Baby made an ideal book for in the bath or on a train. I started it after reading a long, non-fiction book and found it to be just the right contrast. Entertaining, one to make you think, not too light but not overly demanding.
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