Flame Out
A former FBI agent, June Lyons returns to her hometown of Hopewell Falls, New York, to live with her father after her husband’s death. It’s a new career path for her after years of undercover work for the Bureau, but she has a young daughter and needs to provide a stable home that doesn’t include Mommy living undercover with organized gangs for months at a time. Instead she’s patrolling abandoned factories. “There’s nothing to steal—the companies went bankrupt or moved to China decades ago—but bored teenagers or professional firebugs chasing an insurance payment regularly set them on fire.”
The Sleep-Tite Factory is just another derelict warehouse building, notable only because its former owner, Bernie Lawler, was convicted of murdering his wife and three-year-old son. Bernie’s been in prison for the last 30 years, but the bodies of his victims were never found, so people of Hopewell Falls still gossip about the case. June’s father, Gordon Lyons was the cop who led the investigation and arrested Bernie, so the Sleep-Tite Factory is part of her history, too. But not for much longer.
As June drives by the old factory she smells the problem first: “An odor of gasoline dampening out the scent of spring grass.” Rushing into the building with a fire extinguisher, she discovers a woman. “She stepped out of the heart of the blaze and spun frantically left and right, trying to get free of the fire encircling her, the bright light mapping her thrashing in the air.”
June carries the woman from the burning warehouse, but the victim is badly burned and lapses into a coma without saying anything. Not only does June not learn the woman’s name, but learns nothing of the how or why of her presence in the factory.
The mysterious woman is not the only mystery found in the factory. While investigating the fire, a false wall is discovered in the basement, behind which are stored old barrels of toxic chemicals that Bernie L Lawler chose to hide rather than safely dispose of. But there is still another surprise for investigators: the mummified body of a woman sealed in one of the barrels.
Everyone, including June’s father—especially June’s father—assume that the body is that of Bernie Lawler’s wife, Luisa. Gordon is elated that Luisa can finally be laid to rest, and that his investigation and arrest of Lawler had, indeed, been the right thing to do. “So there was the stories about Bernie, the blood evidence in the basement, and bloody handprints in the trunk that looked like Luisa had tried to claw her way out, well, that finally convinced me beyond a reasonable doubt.”
But nothing about the case is what it seems. When evidence tech Annie Lin completes the DNA testing on the body, there is yet another surprise that turns the investigation on its head. The body is not that of Luisa Lawler, but of Vera Batko, the long vanished mother of June’s partner, Dave Batko.
Vera was a member of Hopewell Falls’s Ukrainian immigrant community, of whom Dave’s aunt, Natalya, is the heart and soul and by far the most knowledgeable about Vera, Bernie Lawler, and Luisa. But Natalya is reluctant to talk to the police. She grew up evading imprisonment by Stalin’s secret police, then the Nazis, then Stalin again, until she escaped to the West, bringing along several children, including the town’s former judge, Maxim Medved.
Working beside Bascom Hale an FBI Special Agent, whom June knows but doesn’t especially trust, she finds the investigation hampered by interference from her father and Dave; the lack of information from the Ukrainian community; the unknown identity of the burn victim; and new DNA evidence that exsonerates Bernie Lawler of his wife’s murder. The final blow is the sudden visit by June’s mother. “I would have appreciated a little warning. I could have gone and done some overtime. Run some errands. Anything other than coming over to talk to that woman.”
While Flame Out by M. P. Cooley is a police procedural with enough plot twists to satisfy fans of the genre, it is Cooley’s description of the relationships between the characters that is her greater strength. June Lyons’s relationship with her mother is particularly well done, although whether or not her mother’s New Age behavior will still occasionally irritate June is a question for another book.