Fire Lover

"A barn burner."

"Sparks fly throughout this potent probe into the life of arson investigator John Leonard Orr...A suspenseful, adrenaline-rush account of what one profiler dubbed 'probably the most prolific American arsonist' of the twentieth century."

"Ken Howard narrates this sordid tale with a straightforward, tough, and aggressive voice...His pacing is keen, and he keeps us interested through some technical court transcripts. The fact that this is a real event makes it that much more engrossing."

"The shocking story of John Orr...[A] revelation turns the book from an investigative story to a psychological profile of John Orr as an investigator, criminal, psychopath, and man. Wambaugh's painstaking research, which included interviews with law-enforcement officers, survivors, and victims' families, is astonishing...This saga of a firefighter gone bad should provoke great interest and possibly even some controversy."

Fire Lover is the incredible true story of John Orr who, as a young boy growing up in Los Angeles, watched with awe as firefighters scrambled to put out blazes with a seeming disregard for their own lives. Wanting to emulate his heroes, he later became a fireman with the Glendale Fire Department. An eccentric loner who made few friends, Orr moonlighted as a security guard, eventually becoming a fire captain and one of Southern California’s most renowned serial-arson investigators.

Though he successfully helped apprehend a string of petty arsonists, there was one serial criminal Orr couldn’t track down—one who was responsible for the deaths of four people. These perfectly executed blazes were set by a fire lover who used the same simple yet devastating device time after time. He went undiscovered until one day when he left a fingerprint, one clue investigators could match. When they did, they were stunned to discover that the print belonged to none other than John Orr.

Using interviews, case records, and hundreds of thousands of pages of court transcriptions, Joseph Wambaugh writes a chilling, sophisticated, and suspenseful story that is destined to rank beside his previous bestsellers.