Into the Fire, by Suzanne Brockmann

Into the Fire is lucky thirteen in Ms Brockmann’s Troubleshooters series. Unlike many series, most if not all of the installments in this one can be read as single titles without really missing necessary background information on ongoing story arcs. Ms Brockmann is uniquely talented, in my opinion, in giving new readers enough information to understand everything that is going on, without overloading her books with backstories from previous novels. At the same time, she writes quite a bit of foreshadowing for a number of story arcs in every book—à la Joss Whedon in Buffy—which increases the enjoyment of each successive novel for long time fans.

Ms Brockmann’s novels typically include large casts of characters, many of them recurring from previous novels, with anything from two to five story arcs running through. Most often, only one or two of these will be resolved in any one novel, with the rest left open-ended for future installments.

There are also a number of ‘point of view’ characters who carry the story in alternate chapters—or even alternate sections within a chapter. This works extremely well mainly because a) Ms Brockmann writes from what she calls “deep point of view”—which means that the reader is looking at any given scene or event from that particular character’s point of view, with his memories and feelings coloring his interpretation of whatever is going on (unreliable narrators, anyone?) and b) her characterization is so deft, that the reader has no problem identifying each narrator.

From the very first book, The Unsung Hero (June 2000) the Troubleshooters series has been set in the counterterrorism/military world, as well as in ‘real time’—meaning that the action in the novel is dated at the time of publication, i.e. Into the Fire, which was released on July 22, 2008, is set in late July 2008. (more…)