More than 40 years ago, when she was just four books into what would become a trailblazing career, Toni Morrison told attendees at the annual meeting of the Ohio Arts Council, “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Rachel Howzell Hall, the versatile author of a police procedural series, a string of stand-alone thrillers, and even a short novel coauthored with James Patterson (more on cowriting later), seems to have taken Morrison’s advice to heart since day one of her own career. Hall’s novels, including two short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, eschew the racial tropes common in crime fiction for more nuanced portrayals of Black life. Her protagonists are cops and PIs but also screenwriters, journalists, even digital archaeologists. And although her settings can be exotic, they are more often tethered to Los Angeles’s Black strivers in communities like Baldwin Hills, View Park, or Palmdale.
Yet Hall’s work is most interesting when her characters step outside their comfort zone to bump up against the broader, whiter world, whether it be through work or an interracial relationship. Nowhere is that collision of cultures more apparent or combustible than in What Fire Brings, a fish-out-of-water thriller that takes place during the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic and is set in the bohemian community of Topanga Canyon.
Early in the novel, PI-in-training Bailey Meadows arrives at the secluded Topanga estate of bestselling thriller writer Jack Beckham. She’s the only Black guest at a socially distanced reception for emerging writers, and she’s there to find Sam Morris, a Black woman who works for a South Los Angeles nonprofit dedicated to reuniting families with their missing loved ones, who herself has mysteriously disappeared. Avery Turner, a partner in the PI agency where Bailey has been hired, has helped her gain entry into Jack’s world, as a writer from Baldwin Hills working on her first novel, 39 Miles, which happens to be the distance from Baldwin Hills to Topanga.
Bailey’s heavily plagiarized writing sample impresses Jack and his assistant, Margo Dunn. They offer her a coveted spot in Jack’s writer-in-residence program, established, as Margo tells Bailey, to help “marginalized and traditionally underrepresented groups break into the publishing industry in an Olympian way.” Upon Bailey’s arrival, Margo elucidates the perks of the residency, which include living in a guesthouse on the Beckham estate, the services of a personal chef, and the opportunity to work with Jack, son of the legendary J.D. “Big Jack” Beckham, a difficult but brilliant crime fiction titan who committed suicide in 2005. The biggest perk of all is a cowriting credit on Jack’s next book, a sequel of sorts to Old Topanga Road, a bestselling serial killer tale of two lost women who stumble onto the estate of a reclusive writer. Jack hopes Bailey’s different perspective will give his writing just the boost it needs and cure him of the writer’s block that’s persisted since the disappearance of his wife. It would be enough to raise the suspicions of a seasoned investigator, but Bailey instead dwells on her insecurities about finding Sam.
As the missing-women stories multiply, and the Beckham family saga deepens, it’s sometimes hard to keep all the plot threads straight or dispel the nagging feeling that no one in this novel is who they seem. It’s a feeling worth remembering, because the last third of the book, in which a wildfire threatens to expose long-buried secrets, has so many twists, it’s likely to start a fire tornado. Without spoiling the fun, it’s worth noting that What Fire Brings gives Hall a platform to cogently address climate change and inequities in how missing person cases are investigated, as well as to critique a publishing industry reassessing its practices in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. One among many laugh-to-keep-from-crying moments occurs when Jack fumes as he relates a newspaper article in which a different successful white thriller writer contends that “white authors were having a hard time landing publishing deals. That authors of color were taking these opportunities from him.” Intended to demonstrate allyship, Jack’s story could give a neophyte writer a serious case of impostor syndrome.
But rest assured, Hall is no pretender. She knows her trade, and uses that knowledge to put Black lives and concerns squarely in the frame of What Fire Brings, making Bailey’s twisted journey to the truth a rush as thrilling, and as terrifying, as the Topanga wildfire that threatens all the characters here.•
Paula L Woods is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, an editor, and the author of the Charlotte Justice mysteries.
