Craig Joseph Danner

The Fires of Edgarville Craig Joseph Danner

Tracing the evolution of a small Oregon lumber town and its connection to the Japanese internment during World War II, THE FIRES OF EDGARVILLE is a spellbinding story told with authentic detail and unexpected humor. Craig Danner's second novel is fast-paced and unflinching in its honesty, while filled with compassion for its original and endearing characters. Born just days after the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hank Davenport is a Japanese-American raised in the Pacific Northwest by Caucasian parents. A respected and successful pediatrician, his reputation is destroyed when he is accused of mercy-killing a young patient. Seeking refuge on his adoptive mother's remote and dilapidated orchard, Hank discovers that she is rapidly succumbing to Alzheimer's. Long an outcast from her Mormon family, Myrna herself has only recently returned to the now-failed homestead her father and brothers built and planted when she was a child. As her dementia progresses, she loses hold of her long-held secrets, and Hank becomes entwined in the mystery of a phantom arsonist plaguing a community that holds the slowly turning key to his past-and his future.