On the book jacket of Firestorm, someone says that Nevada Barr knows how to tell stories. That's right on the money. Firestorm is one well-told tale.

It also brought back memories of Young Men and Fire by Norman Maclean and the 1994 tragedy in Colorado. Firestorm is told in the first person, while Young Men and Fire is an investigator's sympathetic account. Barr's version is no less powerful for being fiction.

In Barr's version, unlike either the true stories of the 1949 or 1994 fires, most of the fire fighting crew survives because of a technology that wasn't available in '49 and didn't work in '94. That sets up the plot centered around a murder victim discovered after the fire.

Barr does fine story telling. She detracts from her story by detailing the ruminations of her main character, but I can easily forgive little flaws.

I stick with my earlier appraisal--Barr's stories are very good but not great. This one was engrossing enough to keep me reading, but light enough that I didn't miss the bald eagle that flew across the lake on a Saturday morning in June.

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