Skip to content

Ozark, Missouri
     
Limited to: Words in the TITLE ""American Fire""
Record:  
Author Hesse, Monica.
Title American fire : love, arson, and life in a vanishing land / Monica Hesse.
Publisher New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W.W. Norton & Company, [2017]
Edition First edition.
book jacket

Rating

Descript 255 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm
Subject Arson -- Virginia -- Accomack County.
Rural crimes -- Virginia -- Accomack County.
Accomack County (Va.) -- Rural conditions.
Accomack County (Va.) -- Economic conditions.
Accomack County (Va.) -- Social conditions.
Genre True crime stories.
Contents "Charge that line!" -- "The South starts here" -- "Orange in the sky" -- Charlie -- Monomanie incendiaire -- Tonya -- "Like a ghost" -- "Tell us what you know about that" -- Charlie and Tonya -- Schrödinger's evidence -- The eastern shore arsonist hunters -- "I've seen enough ass to know" -- "Like hell was coming up through the ground" -- Tonya and Charlie -- "They're not hunters at all" -- "I didn't light them all" -- "Someday they'll go down together" -- "Everybody has a reason for why they do things in life" -- "I can't tell you something I don't know" -- "Midnight without makeup" -- The broken things -- "Time to wake up" -- Burned -- "We'd done it before" -- "They came out of everywhere" -- "Moral turpitude" -- What happened next -- "It's over."
Summary "The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn't stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate--there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning. The culprit, and the path that led to these crimes, is a story of twenty-first century America"-- Provided by publisher.
ISBN 9781631490514
1631490516

Record: