100 Books Like Windigo Fire

Though this is Penny’s first in the “Three Pines” series featuring CI Armand Gamache, I’ll confess that I initially read it out of order. I picked up a later Penny book and liked it well enough to go back and start from the beginning.

This book feels like a debut. The writing is good, but not quite as sure-handed as more recent books (which makes sense). It introduces us to Armand Gamache, a seasoned detective if ever there was one, and to the cast of characters in Three Pines.

By the time I finished it the first time around, I’d become a legit Gamache fan-girl. This series is one of the few that I’m so enamored with that I pre-order forthcoming titles. ‘Nuff said.

The Suicide Murders introduces Benny Cooperman, one of the most beloved characters in Canadian fiction, and a major influence on my own crime fiction. Howard Engel’s 14 Cooperman novels are filled with sharp dialogue and sparkling wit, and play with the tropes of detective fiction. A nice Jewish boy who runs a small detective agency, Benny doesn’t swear or carry a gun, and he’s squeamish about violence—much like my Pat Tierney protagonist--giving the PI genre a distinctly Canadian twist. 

The Suicide Murders was released in 1980, and Engel’s impact on crime fiction was enormous. He set most of the Cooperman books in the fictional town of Grantham, recognizable as St. Catharines, Ontario, where he grew up. Engel proved that writers could set stories on their own turf and have them published.

The Water Rat of Wanchai is the first book in the Ava Lee crime thriller series. Tough, fearless Ava is a forensic accountant who travels to exotic locales (all well-known to author Ian Hamilton) chasing bad debts. The settings aren’t Canadian, but Ava is: she immigrated to Canada from Hong Kong as a child, and grew up in Richmond Hill, outside Toronto. Her current home is in Toronto’s trendy Yorkville neighborhood, but she has strong business ties to Asia. In many ways, she’s a typical Canadian—raised and educated in Canada, with ties to another part of the world, and fluent in a language other than Canada’s two official languages, English and French. All 15 Ava Lee books deliver on two fronts: they are crime thrillers and delightful armchair travel.

Diverse characters who feel like friends; a picturesque town that will have you checking Google maps for your next road trip; a murder; an unexpected love story; what is not to love about this book?

This is my favorite read of the year. I still envision the characters months after reading, as if I visited “Beautiful” on a wild adventure to solve a mystery and met an eclectic bunch of new travel mates along the way. The ending will surprise you in more ways than one. An easy, solid 5+ stars for this one.

This book concerns a group of young firefighters known as smokejumpers and the catastrophic Mann Gulch Forest Fire in Montana in 1949. 

Maclean was from the community and worked in the US Forest Service before he became a professor and eventually an author who spent years researching the event. You learn about the physics of forest fires, the invention of the first "escape fire," how multiple and cascading errors can lead to a disastrous outcome, and about the lives and heroics of a group of firefighters.

Interestingly, it is all seen through the journey of a man trying to understand a captivating event from his past. This book falls pretty squarely in the non-fiction category, but has multiple stories interwoven with the facts. It helps that Maclean was not only an author of many nonfiction articles, but also the author of the highly successful novel (and movie) A River Runs… show more.

I enjoyed the drama and detail associated with the wildfire conflagration that burned into Fort McMurray all nested within the dissonance between climate-change-driven wildfires and climate-change-driving fossil fuel extraction.

Aspects of this fire can undoubtedly be called a natural disaster, a land management failure, a suppression-mentality failure, a social trauma, and a catastrophic event to many people in the area; being more recent than 1910, however, we don’t know yet the full extent of its impacts on regional, national and global policy. However, the setting and direct dissonance over “what is a fuel for what” is unique and provides new insights for detailed readers.

It is a lesson for those moving forward in denial of climate change for the sake of continued riches that history will judge them harshly.

Technically not a park ranger (but close enough), Philip Connors works seasonally as a fire lookout in one of the last remaining fire towers in the nation,10,000 feet above sea level in the vast fastness of the Gila National Wilderness of New Mexico. From his 7’ by 7’ tower, he oversees a huge swath of a 2.7 million-acre wilderness that seems to want to burn, seeing more than 30,000 lightning strikes a year. It’s a rugged, remote, lonely landscape – and a singular way of life. Like me, Connors left a job as an editor to take up in the wilderness in 2002, and like me, he returns every season because it’s where he belongs. Fire Season explores the history of the Forest Service, fire management, and wilderness conservation in a can’t-put-it-down fashion.

There cannot be any book list on wildfire without one from the esteemed Stephen Pyne, who is a historian by training with a long, personal track record with fire that lets him bring richness and reality to his analysis and prose.

Sure, there are shorter and more compact books in his collection from his career (massive textbooks to short booklets), but this one spans a pivotal time for land management and wildfire suppression policies, coupled with human expansion and climate change, that embodies our emerging wildfire crisis–hence the ‘bookends’ of two fires.

I love Dr. Pyne’s poignant writing style from such a rich depth of experience; it is worth the deep dive into the topic!

I read this to get an authentic perspective on wildland firefighting for my novel, but I got so much more out of it than that. The book interweaves the author’s firsthand account of his crew’s battles during a hellacious fire season with the history of a priest saving townspeople from an infamous 1871 inferno. Those echoes of the past do a good job of supporting Leschak’s story, which is the real meat of the book.

Leschak is a legit badass as the commander of a helitack crew battling fires across a large region—but what I related to, deeply, was his approach to leadership, his intellectual struggle with organized religion, and his contemplative nature.

Mary's story shows the harsh reality of being a woman in a man's world – wildland firefighting. Her vulnerability and truth were incredibly relatable to me. The pressure to always be on, always strong, always performing, lest one moment of softness be held up as an example of why women don't belong.