Philip Dryden is a journalist near Cambridgeshire Fens in England. His personal life has taken many paths that have left him limited in his work life and even less so in his personal life. Philip's wife Laura lies comatose in a hospital bed after their horrible car crash into 20 feet of water four years before. A ticker machine with a button that Laura can press to select letters of the alphabet is their only means of communication. Laura has managed to have lucid moments where she can spell out a word or two, while the rest of the tape reveals random letters, most likely from muscle spasms or random firings in her brain.

Beside Laura in her hospital room lies Maggie Beck, a personal friend to Philip's family. Maggie is dying from cancer and asks Philip to find her daughter, who's on holiday, so that Maggie can reveal a lie she's kept for 27 years. Philip leaves Maggie with a tape recorder while he searches for her daughter. Twenty-seven years before, an American plane crashed on Maggie's family's property igniting fuel that burned up her family, including her two- week-old baby. The only survivors were Maggie and an infant boy, Lyndon, of an American family on the military plane. Lyndon Koskinski has lived in Texas with his grandparents, who sent Maggie pictures and letters while he grew up. Now, Lyndon has returned to England as an American solider who escaped from four weeks in a cell in Al Rasheid Baghdad Hilton.

Before she dies, Maggie informs her daughter Estelle and Lyndon that Lyndon is really her child Matty rescued from his crib in the burning home and given to the Koskinski family to keep him safe from her secrets. Philip promises Maggie that he will find Matty's father. She left stipulations with her lawyers, but there are more secrets to tell Estelle. However, Maggie takes her last breath before they are revealed. Her taped messages are the only clues, but the last tape is missing.

Phillip investigates the details surrounding the fiery crash all those years before while still doing his job as a reporter. As Philip investigates the rape of a young girl and her father's disappearance after going out to seek revenge, he discovers many paths that cross. Philip overcomes phobias and fear to seek the truth, putting himself in danger's way. Meanwhile Laura, who listened to Maggie as she confessed to the cassette recorder, tries desperately to communicate with Philip on the ticker tape machine before it's too late.

Jim Kelly's THE FIRE BABY was a refreshing read for me. I became engrossed with the plot immediately and the characters were so humanized that I could not put the book down. I enjoyed the British colloquialisms and especially the angst of a man in love with a wife who cannot respond and the pain that their future together may be no more than him holding her hand while she lies in a hospital bed. I found Kelly's book to be simply stimulating.

Book Summary

An American plane crashes in a remote farm on England's Cambridgeshire Fens. Out of the flames walks a young woman, Maggie Beck, with a baby in her arms--the only two survivors. Now, twenty-seven years later, Maggie is dying. As she lies in the hospital, she give a startling deathbed confession to the patient in the bed next to hers, Laura, a woman slowly awakening from a coma. The confession would blow open the murder case that Laura's husband, reporter Philip Dryden, is covering... if only Laura could communicate the shocking secrets she's learned.