Tinderbox

Santa Ana winds, dry chaparral, a culture with more than its share of matches and gasoline and rage. Among Southern California nightmares, fires rank second only to earthquakes. But although our literature, from Nathanael West to Susan Straight, has long reflected this, an arson investigator like Don Winslow’s Jack Wade is a rarity among the ranks of fictional cops and private eyes.

Winslow (“The Death and Life of Bobby Z”) convinces us that other writers have missed a beat. “California Fire and Life”--the title is also the name of the insurance company for which Wade works as a claims adjuster--is a successful thriller, raised above the ordinary by two things: Winslow’s prose style and the expertise he acquired in 15 years of working at the same job as his hero.

Wade, it seems, used to investigate fires for the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. He fell in love with a fellow deputy, Letitia del Rio, and was planning a family when he lost his job, took to drink and sent Letty away. The reason: He beat up a suspect in a gang-related arson to elicit a confession and keep an elderly witness from having to testify. It all went wrong. His partner, “Accidentally” Bentley, ratted on him. Wade was fired. The witness was murdered. The bad guys got off.

Only an apparent fluke of luck allowed Wade to be hired by California Fire and Life, where for 12 years he has worked as a “claims dog,” surfing in his spare time, mourning the loss of Letty. He’s out on his Hobie long board off Dana Point when he spots smoke on shore. Later he gets the call. Fire has consumed one wing of a mansion owned by real estate mogul Nicky Vale, along with a collection of 18th century furniture and Vale’s wife, Pamela, who was drunk and smoking in bed.

Adjusting the $3-million claim, Wade collides with his past. Pamela Vale was Letitia del Rio’s sister. And the sheriff’s investigator is Bentley, who, true to his nickname and his lazy, slipshod nature, declares the death an accident.

Wade disagrees. He probes the wreckage much more thoroughly than Bentley did, and finds evidence of arson and murder. He rejects Vale’s claim, provoking a $50-million lawsuit against California Fire and Life, the wrath of his bosses and more trouble than he could have dreamed of.

Nicky Vale isn’t just the sleazy developer he seems to be. His real name is Daziatnik Valeshin, and his career has taken him from KGB interrogator in Afghanistan (where his specialty was burning moujahedeen alive) to his current post of pakhan, or godfather, in Southern California’s Russian mob. He has judges, politicians and maybe Wade’s own company in his pocket. He wants to jerry-build condos all over the last open stretch of coast north of Camp Pendleton, and he isn’t about to let one stubborn, honest man stand in his way.

“Stubborn and honest” is really all there is to say about Wade, just as “tough, smart and sexy” sum up Letty, obliged to work with him again for the sake of her sister’s children. The other characters are vivid but standard issue for thrillers. Winslow’s style, though, is a little different.

*

It’s a mixture of cop-speak and surf-speak, blunt and staccato. We hear echoes of James Ellroy and the John Gregory Dunne of “True Confessions,” and there’s a love scene that cribs heavily from Robert Jordan and Maria in the sleeping bag in Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” but mostly it’s Winslow’s own voice. He can be funny, in a sardonic way, but mostly he’s angry--at venality, at corruption, at just about everything except a job well done.

It’s a style that’s good for explaining things without bogging us down, and Winslow does a lot of explaining. High on terminology, as if reading our very first police procedural, we learn about “fuel load” and “alligator char” and “V-patterns” and “flying fairies.” Winslow has done his research on Russian and Vietnamese gangs, but the fire stuff he knows. We can tell the difference. It’s genuine, like the anger--smoldering under the fluffy ash of a plot that, as thriller plots tend to do, tries to tie too much together and ends up paranoid and silly.*