The Fires of Edgarville by Craig Joseph Danner

Hank Davenport is a man in search of his life. Born just days after the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he is a Japanese-American raised in the Pacific Northwest by Caucasian parents. A respected and successful pediatrician, his reputation is destroyed when he is accused of mercy-killing a young patient.

Seeking refuge on his adoptive mother's remote and dilapidated orchard, Hank discovers that she is rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's. Long an outcast from her Mormon family, Myrna herself has only recently returned to the now-failed homestead her father and brothers built and planted when she was a child. As her dementia progresses, her long-held secrets are revealed, and Hank becomes entwined in the mystery of a phantom arsonist plaguing a community that holds the slowly turning key to his past and his future.

Tracing the evolution of a small Oregon lumber town and its connection to the Japanese internment during World War II, The Fires of Edgarville is a spellbinding story told with authentic detail and unexpected humor. Craig Danner's second novel is fast-paced and unflinching in its honesty, while filled with compassion for its original and endearing characters.

The Fires of Edgarville is a daring and enthralling novel with the power to surprise anyone who picks it up. Craig Joseph Danner takes a tiny Northwestern town and two unlikely protagonists -- a defamed Japanese-American doctor and an irascible senile woman -- and somehow turns out high drama. This novel is slender and fast-paced, but the story is rich and artfully woven with dazzling crescendos of action and original characters in search of elusive truths. -- Jim Lynch, author of The Highest Tide

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