'The window's lead is melting, its glass is bowing out. Within the plaster walls, horsehairs crisp in filaments of fire. Soon there is nothing left within the room. Wood. Wool. Flesh. Even metal. Gone. So now, like any living thing, flame has a choice: Feed or die. Across the threshold, a city sleeps.' WHY SHOULDN'T GOD'S VENGEANCE BE SPECTACULAR? 1666. The Great Plague, that killed 100,000 citizens, has passed. Londoners celebrate survival in different ways. Some with praising God. Many, including the Merry Monarch and his court, with sin. They drink. They gamble. They indulge in carnal delights. While others… 666 is the number of the Beast, this the year foretold when Christ will return. To slay the Devil. To bring the New Jerusalem. A gang of fanatics - the Saints - choose to hasten that prophesied day. They will kidnap, rape, murder. Above all, they will kill a king. For in the renegade Captain Blood they have the perfect assassin. Two men - the highwayman William Coke and the thief-taker Pitman - are recruited to stop them. Both fall victim to the Saint's foul plots. All seems lost… Yet in the early hours of September 2nd, 1666, something starts that will overtake them all - fanatics, princes, soldiers and fops, actresses and holy murderers. For the year of the Beast is three quarters done and the Devil has not yet had his due. London's a tinder box. Politically, sexually, religiously. Literally. It is about to burn. 'The brilliance of Fire is that while the villains and their motives are known, the rest of the plot is slowly revealed in an engrossing thriller that shifts from a riverside theatre to the cramped confines of a 17th-century warship and finally to the congested parishes of London.' - Macleans Magazine

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