Set the Night on Fire
Libby Fischer Hellmann

By Ted Hertel, Deadly Pleasures

Rating:  B+

After a woman makes contact with Casey Hilliard, the woman is run off the road and is killed.  When Casey's daughter Lila goes Christmas shopping, she returns to find his house ablaze, her father and brother dead.  The police believe that faulty wiring of the Christmas tree lights started the fire, but Lila knows that she had unplugged them just before she left the house.  She can't convince the authorities differently, however.  Then someone begins following her, a man on a motorcycle shoots at her and she narrowly escapes death when her apartment is blown up.  Lila has no idea who is after her or why, but she has been helped on several occasions by a man connected to her father's past in Chicago in the 1960s.  Can she trust him?  Should she?

Libby Fischer Hellmann, author of the fine Ellie Foreman and Georgia Davis mystery series, has written a tense standalone novel that is divided into three parts.  The first and last sections of the book take place in the present day, while the middle portion is set in the late ‘60s, around the Democratic Convention in Chicago, the Black Panthers, and the rise and fall of the youth movements of the time.  Hellmann manages to create suspense through her interpretation of well-known events, placing her characters and their story into the history of those violent and bitter times.

Politics, suspense, and action all blend seamlessly together to create a fine thriller.  Her research into that era brings it alive for those who were not there.  Whether in the 1960s or the present day, the stories are filled with true-to-life characters, each of whom acts in his or her own believable fashion, from anger and bitterness to pettiness, love or hate. The complex plot will keep the reader not only guessing but on the edge of the seat as the layers are slowly peeled back to reveal the solution some forty years after the central events chronicled.  This is perhaps the best novel that Hellmann has yet written. 

All content © Libby Fischer Hellmann.