Fires of Time
 Barry Wilson
 (Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
 1999 Epoch Press
 ISBN: 0972561501

A firefighter travels back in time to some of America's greatest fires.

We start out on a normal day on Hempstead Drive in suburbia as two neighbors are exchanging a dash of cinnamon for an apple pie. One women's toddler is upstairs napping & her son is in the basement with a friend, experimenting with a lighter & a hair spray can. WHOOOSH! & life will never be the same for the Susan Caulfield.

Veteran Firefighter Scott McLean is struggling through the final event of a combat course in a 90^° summer day encased in full regalia. He's not doing too well. Then the alarm sounds & everyone heads out toward the fire on Hempstead Drive.

Scott has a lifelong friend, geeky Brian Daniels, who has made a time machine. He has experimented with his cat, who seems to have enjoyed the ride. On a whim one evening, Scott gets inside the ship &...

...we're back in 1871 Chicago, where George McLean & his brother, Packy, are returning from fishing to meet their father at the planing mill. Anyone who knows Chicago's history (& I do, having once lived there for 17 years) knows what's going to happen next...Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicks over a lantern thus starting the Great Chicago Fire. That night John Patrick McLean decides to become a firefighter, starting the long & honorable family tradition that brings us to the present with Scott.

Off he goes again...to San Francisco in 1906. Back & forth between time & fires we go.

Written as fiction, Fires of Time is an interesting if un-edited ride into conflagrations present & past.

Barry Wilson is a veteran firefighter paramedic, & knows of what he writes -- fires in our cities, how they start, how they grow & how they are fought.

For a debut novel based on historical information & present day firefighting techniques, with a dash of science-fiction, Fires of Time is quite well written, although my editor's hat was frequently vibrating. It got me involved & it taught me a thing or two about fires.
(08/17/03)

Rebecca