Richard Hicks

The Devil's Breath Richard Hicks

IN THE FOOTHILLS OF SAN DIEGO, A SERIAL ARSONIST AWAITS THE WIND Eddie DeSilva, San Diego's ex-chief of police, is asked to take on a "cold case" that turns out to be anything but cold. It's the height of the dangerous fire season and a raging wildfire, believed to have been set by an arsonist, has rained ashes on the city for five days, causing massive evacuations. Three years earlier, in nearby Diablo Gorge, three fire-fighters died when they were encircled by a raging wildfire and the calcified bones of two others were found in the ashes, their deaths the result of an apparent unsolved arson-homicide. Now an arsonist, who calls himself Moonlighter, is back-writing poems about his "feats of fire" on internet chat rooms frequented by pyromaniacs. When neither the state fire authorities nor the FBI are willing to join forces to catch the serial arsonist, DeSilva forms his own team that includes his former partner, detective Fisher Wells, psychologist (and currant main-squeeze), Pauline Graham, and Sunny Szabo, a recovering meth addict suffering from agoraphobia. As the Santa Ana winds-the devil's breath-blow hot out of the mountains, the sociopathic arsonist spins out of control, in this taut police procedural, the third in the Eddie DeSilva mystery series.