ASHES NEVER LIE

A series of suspicious fires proves to be only the tip of the iceberg in Goldberg’s latest dispatch from the San Fernando Valley.

L.A. County Sheriff’s Department arson investigator Walter Sharpe and his gung-ho new partner, Andrew Walker, are called to the Chatsworth Nature Preserve, where someone has set a Toyota Camry ablaze. Soon afterward, following the trail of devastation left by a deadly virus that’s disappeared from Triax Biotech, homicide detectives Duncan Pavone, back from retirement, and Eve Ronin, who’s recently had a TV series based on her work, track down Triax microbiologist Patrick Lopresti, only to watch his house explode in a fireball before their eyes, leaving Lopresti inside, shot in the head in a bizarre apparent suicide. Justine Bryce, Lopresti’s lover and presumed partner in crime who’s also been exposed to the virus, has reacted by going on the lam. Even when the cops confront her, she refuses to surrender for fear of infecting someone else. In the meantime, Sharpe and Walker have uncovered an epidemic of house fires in and around the Twin Lakes development blamed on the remarkably similar failures of domestic electrical appliances. There’s clearly a mastermind behind this crime wave. But what’s the connection between this mastermind and the Triax employee who’s blown up his own house rather than give himself up along with the virus? The path to answers and convictions leads to a San Diego SciCon in which Eve and Walker dress up as Wonder Woman and the Mandalorian in order to approach their suspect without arousing any suspicion and, incidentally, to provide a suitably colorful not-quite-finale to this knockabout procedural.

Pure enjoyment for anyone who doesn’t happen to own a home in the Valley.