The Fireman

From the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of NOS4A2 and Heart-Shaped Box comes a chilling novel about a worldwide pandemic of spontaneous combustion that threatens to reduce civilization to ashes and a band of improbable heroes who battle to save it, led by one powerful and enigmatic man known as the Fireman. The fireman is coming. Stay cool. No one knows exactly when it began or where it originated. A terrifying new plague is spreading like wildfire across the country, striking cities one by one: Boston, Detroit, Seattle. The doctors call it Draco Incendia Trychophyton. To everyone else it’s Dragonscale, a highly contagious, deadly spore that marks its hosts with beautiful black and gold marks across their bodies—before causing them to burst into flames. Millions are infected; blazes erupt everywhere. There is no antidote. No one is safe. Harper Grayson, a compassionate, dedicated nurse as pragmatic as Mary Poppins, treated hundreds of infected patients before her hospital burned to the ground. Now she’s discovered the telltale gold-flecked marks on her skin. When the outbreak first began, she and her husband, Jakob, had made a pact: they would take matters into their own hands if they became infected. To Jakob’s dismay, Harper wants to live—at least until the fetus she is carrying comes to term. At the hospital, she witnessed infected mothers give birth to healthy babies and believes hers will be fine too. . . if she can live long enough to deliver the child. Convinced that his do-gooding wife has made him sick, Jakob becomes unhinged, and eventually abandons her as their placid New England community collapses in terror. The chaos gives rise to ruthless Cremation Squads—armed, self-appointed posses roaming the streets and woods to exterminate those who they believe carry the spore. But Harper isn’t as alone as she fears: a mysterious and compelling stranger she briefly met at the hospital, a man in a dirty yellow fire fighter’s jacket, carrying a hooked iron bar, straddles the abyss between insanity and death. Known as The Fireman, he strolls the ruins of New Hampshire, a madman afflicted with Dragonscale who has learned to control the fire within himself, using it as a shield to protect the hunted . . . and as a weapon to avenge the wronged. In the desperate season to come, as the world burns out of control, Harper must learn the Fireman’s secrets before her life—and that of her unborn child—goes up in smoke.

Rekindling Her Life After the fire that injured her and burned down Goose Harbor's only church fourteen years ago, Shelby Beck is planning to rebuild—the structure and her life. But her wounds have always caused her to keep men at a distance. When Joel Palermo returns to town as a fireman and is assigned to help Shelby raise funds for the new construction, she's surprised at how easy it is to get close to her brother's old friend. Could he be the man she'll finally trust enough to let in? Or will the bond they've built go up in flames, when Joel's own scars are revealed? Goose Harbor: Love is in big supply on the shores of Lake Michigan

After fifteen years of marriage, Cassie Johnson is feeling the stresses and strains of her relationship with Peck, the town's newly appointed fire chief, as the time he spends saving others and Cassie's attraction to one of his colleagues could doom their lives together, in a novel set in South Carolina's low country in 1970. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Widowed firefighter Danny Santori needs a miracle. Or at least a full-time babysitter who can handle his four lively kids. With a son and daughter to raise, busy landscape designer Tessa Doherty could also use some divine domestic intervention. All they have to do is take turns watching each other's children. What could be simpler? Doing double duty as a stand-in nanny is wreaking havoc with Tessa's life. And her irresistible attraction to the roguishly charming single dad is a complication the fiercely independent career woman doesn't want or need. Danny isn't trying to stand in the way of Tessa's dreams and goals. But he's hoping she'll see that five plus three equals…one family!

Black Sheep Son Nothing about going home to Gordon Falls is easy for fireman Clark Bradens. His role as local bad boy is firmly established, though he's determined to use his newfound faith to change people's minds. But Clark isn't the only one coming home to hard times. When Melba Wingate came home from Chicago to help her ailing father, she wasn't expecting to unravel a family secret. As Melba wades through the past to find the truth about her father, Clark becomes an unlikely ally. And while neither can change the past, the future is theirs to shape.

In the aftermath of the storm of the century, Rob Wyatt, a thirty-two-year-old Charleston bachelor, finds himself assessing his life as well as his property damage. Life changes culminate at the annual Volunteer Fire Department Fair, as Rob's past and future collide in what could either be catastrophe or salvation.

"Category: home and family"--Page 4 of cover.