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FICTION
Devil’s Kitchen
Candice Fox
Bantam, $34.99
Candice Fox never loses sight of the possibility of redemption.
It’s a troubling premise. The crew of Engine 99, four of New York’s finest firefighters, have gone rogue. For the past 10 years, they have been using the fires they attend to set up burglaries and have been getting away with it.
Devil’s Kitchen is the fourth of Australian author Candice Fox’s stand-alone crime novels set in America, each of which is entirely different in terms of location and plot. What they have in common, however, is an attention to those whose lives have taken a downturn, often through no fault of their own.
How these characters negotiate their way out of the pickle in which they inevitably find themselves serves to redefine them in ways that are always moving.
Take firefighter Ben Haig, who is tackling a blaze in a fabric store. As it emerges, this conflagration has been deliberately set as a cover for Ben to crawl under the building to disarm the security system in an adjacent jewellery shop that he and his crew plan later to raid. The complication being that Ben’s de facto and her little boy have been missing for two months and he suspects his team are involved in her disappearance.
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Which is why, two months earlier, Ben left a hand-written letter on the windshield of a homicide detective from the South Bronx suggesting he would trade information on a number of high-level heists in return for help locating his family. It’s a deal Ben knows will inevitably result in a criminal charge against him, but he is desperate to know the truth.
Enter Andy, not her real name, a “specialist” secretly hired by the FBI to get the goods on the robberies and find the missing mother and child, in that order. Andy, who inevitably has her own complex backstory, is the kind of indomitable, smart-mouthed woman Fox does so well. As was Eden who appeared in Fox’s first outstanding crime novel, Hades, which won a Ned Kelly in 2014 for Best Debut Crime Fiction.
Andy is made of similar stuff. She’s beautiful, smart and adept at handling the kind of double bluff that will get her in with the Engine 99 team. This involves persuading Ben that they should pretend to be a couple trying to hide the fact that they are in a romantic relationship while not actually being in one.