Diversionary Fires

Where there's smoke, there's fire.

And where there's fire, there's Tara Atwater.

Left in her grandparents' care while her reckless mother works the Ohio carnival circuit, Tara learned the strange art of the diversionary fire in 1970 from grandmother Beryl, her mentor in flame. She grows too quickly into a mother who never knew her own, raising a son who will never know his father, along Ohio's Fuego River, where everyone is disparaged as "water bugs". She mows yards, empties bedpans and presses shirts and, when she dreams, it's for her son Dare.

So, when Tara comes to hold the right combination of numbers to a record-breaking lottery, she has one problem before she can claim the winnings: what to do about the dead man, stabbed by her teenage son, on the kitchen floor?

It was, after all, his ticket.

A diversionary fire will again be the answer and suddenly, from the most marginal means to material comforts never imagined, Tara will learn that good luck and bad luck can look dangerously alike, as flames in all their variation, dense and smoldering, engulf and divide everyone in her radius:

Percy, desperate to leave Ohio, if only he could scrape up the gas money... Millicent, whose joy at motherhood is eclipsed by a heartbreaking crucible...Peaches, the landlady with a secret in the attic...Mr. Tomlinson, old, blind and bedridden but not quite done...Vawnda, victimized by her husband Meade for the last time...Elder Lauretta, the simple churchgoer with the complicated hair....the wealthy Marquardt family and their suffocating wingspan of influence...Betty from New Orleans, who creates her own pyrotechnics after a couple Sazeracs...Suzette, whose show business aspirations yield international celebrity....fortuneteller Tatiana, who prophesizes the dangers of anything sharp or shiny...and son Dare, who forces his way through the hazy past of his real father and finds an explosive truth.

As variants of crimson swirl through five decades of the Atwater family, 'Diversionary Fires' is more than a saga, mystery or thriller...it's an acrid journey through the ironic life of a brash, uncompromising woman who always has a book of matches ready.