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….
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Sarah-Jane Collins’ Radiant Heat, which is available as of January 23rd 2024.
Alison is alive. She rode out the fire on the damp tiles of her bathroom, her entire body swaddled in a wet woolen blanket. The flames crackled around her, the bitter char of eucalyptus settling in the back of her throat. The wildfire devastated the Victoria countryside she calls home, and when Alison creeps out of her hiding place, she spots a soot-covered cherry red car in her driveway, and in it, a woman. She finds the woman’s bag. An Simone Arnold. A piece of Alison’s full name and address. But why?
As Alison searches for answers across Australia’s harsh landscape, she soon learns that the fire isn’t the only threat she’s facing….
By midmorning the heat was up there, pushing 104 degrees before the clock hit eleven, a hot wind racing up to a hundred kilometers an hour, air forced around the state like a giant dryer, not a drop of moisture about— humidity as low as two percent— and even in bayside Melbourne, where Alison had spent the night at a friend’s, it felt as though her eyeballs might cook in her skull.
She’d tossed her backpack into the boot of her car, slid into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition, the radio stuttering to life . . . a high like that forecast, it’s going to be a scorcher, and a total fire ban is in place, with the premier urging people in high-risk areas to stay close to their radios for updates . . . Alison knew the warnings about fires you can’t escape, moments you can’t change, houses you can’t save, lives you can’t get back; she’d heard it from her grandfather every summer since she was small.
The sound of a gum tree falling, one with a hundred years or more on its ledger, is the loudest, most sustained crack of thunder you’ll ever hear, as limbs fold and crumple and crash and tumble all that long way down to the ground; timber splits and splinters with a wrenching that slices through time and tears at the tranquillity of the day. You’re in the eye of a storm when the thunder and lightning are simultaneous. Sound travels slower than light. When you can hear something loud enough to shake your eardrums and clatter about in the space between your ribs, it’s right on top of you.
When Alison heard the first scream of the fire, she thought it was a gum blown down in the breeze. But at the window in her bedroom, she looked out across the bush and saw the smoke, heard more crashes—and then she saw it, coming fast, glimpses of red- hot movement among the trunks. Embers pushed the fire forward, rushing and crackling and spreading their blazing fury wide; there didn’t seem to be time to even consider leaving—the car was on the other side of the house, but Alison had no way to know whether the fire was farther down the drive, making escape an impossibility. Instead, she had grabbed a blanket from the linen cupboard in the hall and rushed into the bathroom, dunking it in the bathtub.
Outside, the fire grabbed at trees and closed around them, two, three, four at a time, obliterating them with its gaping jaws, spitting still-smoldering remnants forward, leaving smoked skeletons in its wake; the bathroom was on the northeastern side of the house and Alison cowered there, her entire body swaddled in the thick, wet woolen blanket, the tile floor damp and cool as her cheek pressed hard against it. The noise was unbearable—a roaring, whooshing, crackling din; she closed her eyes and waited, uncertain what to do when you don’t believe in prayer, and the sticky camphor smell of the blanket distracted her, made her hold the air in her lungs. With a start, she remembered to breathe, not sure how long it had been between gasps—it was so hot. She was sweating and the air felt empty, like the oxygen was all gone. A shower of glass rained down on the blanket, and Alison could feel the pressure in the room change; she lifted a corner of the blanket, saw a smoky, hazy, wide- pen rectangle where the window had been, and flames just barely a meter away, spewing embers and thick smoke in her direction, and then, with one fickle twist, the firestorm receded—like a giant had drawn a deep breath in—the front changing tack as a southerly blew through.
Sitting now with the bitter char of burned eucalypt in the back of her nostrils, Alison felt as though she had been split in two. Slumped in the dirty ash, she traced the lines of her name with her fingers, rubbed them out, pushed the black dust back into place, and used her little finger to trace a quiet curve like the bend of the tawny frogmouth’s neck, where the fine, sharp feathers curved from the base of its head to the tops of its wings. The way the brown dirt mingled with the whitest parts of the ashy ends of sticks and leaves and whatever else evoked the mottle of their coats. The sun sunk lower still in the sky of wild red.
Get up. Keep moving.
She didn’t listen to the unsettled voice inside her, just kept thinking about her morning, knees dug deep into the soot, rocks pressing into the soft hardness of her patellas. Still on her knees, she felt uneasy with the recollection, uneasy with the way it swished about in her brain. The pieces weren’t quite whole, the moments not quite matching. Like the night the cops had knocked on her door and told her about the accident. Taken her parents away with a sentence. Stopped up the one remaining valve in her calcifying heart. She heard the whoosh of the cooling southerly breeze as it tickled the strands of hair at the nape of her neck, on her temples, and over her ears. From the silent bush she felt an intensity, as if it were staring at her. I’m losing it. She peered through the gaps in the thick low brush, tried to locate the feeling’s source. A sharp jump in her bones as a twig snapped somewhere in that direction. The crisp, easy break of small wood under a big foot. There’s someone there.
“Who’s there?” Her voice carried into the trees, where it was absorbed and flattened. Deadened and muted by too much clutter. Nothing came back out.
Alison stood up and tried to shake the shuddering shiver from her frame. Could be anything. Could be nothing. Could be the snap and pop of wood returning to rest from heat- swelled discomfort. No one’s going to be out here in the middle of this. Alison knew she shouldn’t be either; it was time to get moving again.
Berkley Copyright 2024
