Radiant Heat
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- £2.99
Publisher Description
When a catastrophic wildfire suddenly rips through a woman’s hometown, she thinks she is lucky to have survived . . . until she finds a dead woman in her driveway, clutching a piece of paper with her name on it. . . .
The blaze came out of nowhere one summer afternoon, a wall of fire fed by blustering wind. Yet, somehow, Alison is alive. She rode out the fire on the damp tiles of her bathroom, her entire body swaddled in a wet woolen blanket. As flames crackled around her, the bitter char of eucalyptus settled in the back of her throat, each breath more desperate than the last.
The wildfire that devastated the Victoria countryside Alison calls home sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to obliterate her carefully constructed life. When Alison emerges from her sheltering place, she spots a soot-covered cherry red car in her driveway, and in it, a dead woman. Alison has never met Simone Arnold in her life . . . or so she thinks. So what is Simone doing here?
As Alison searches for answers across Australia’s scorched bushlands, she soon learns that the fire isn’t the only threat she’s facing. . . .
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Collins delivers a clever, unsettling debut about the mysterious connection between two apparent strangers. Australian artist Alison King has barely survived a brushfire that devastated her small town of Lake Bend. After covering herself in a bathwater-soaked blanket while the flames ravaged her home, she's emerged safely, only to find a soot-covered car near the ruins of her house that contains a strange woman's corpse. Alison can't spot an obvious cause of the woman's death, but gets a shock when she looks in the dead woman's wallet: beneath a driver's license IDing the dead woman as Simone Arnold is a paper bearing Alison's own name and home address. The police are curious about why Simone would have resolved to visit a perfect stranger, curiosity that blossoms into suspicion after they discover that, though Alison and Simone had once lived in the same apartment building, Alison insists they've never met. As Alison chases down more information about Simone to satisfy personal curiosity and clear herself of wrongdoing, she slowly uncovers uncomfortable points of connection between Simone and herself. Nimbly balancing character study and straight-up mystery, Collins is patient with her reveals, but never at the expense of the book's steady momentum. This is a writer to watch.
