To describe a bushfire is to describe a monster. We speak of flanks, fingers, tails and tongues, Chloe Hooper observes in The Arsonist, of a predatory, devouring hunger.

In The Arsonist, Hooper reignites the memories of those cataclysmic events with relentless, devastating effect. Her focus is on one fire, deliberately lit, an 82,000-acre flare-up on the outskirts of Churchill in Central Gippsland.

Images of the bushfire as a creature that ‘licks’ the land open The Arsonist, and tempt the reader to position the fire as the book’s central character. If this were the case, however, there’d be no need to read more than seventy pages. Were we to accept a fire-as-protagonist thesis, the greatest point of tension would occur in the first act, causing the rest of the book to slump. But the central character of The Arsonist is Brendan Sokaluk, a shadowy shapeshifter, and the book an inquiry into why he set his hometown ablaze.

What drives people to light bushfires? Spite? Revenge? Psychosis? A fierce need by the luckless and downtrodden to control events for once? Maybe an urge to initiate something elemental and – in this country – even mythical? We might never know the mind of a firebug. But as Australia faces increasingly warm summers in a changing climate, Chloe Hooper attempted to find out.

Hooper begins with a beautifully poetic, mournful account of the ruin wreaked by the fire – she writes the landscape so very well – before focusing on the police and the investigation that eventually results in the arrest of Sokaluk.

In an engrossing report brimming with urgent detail and palpable suspense, Hooper diligently retraces the steps of those investigations. Dividing the book into three sections, the author brings together the findings of crime scene experts, forensic fire scientists, and arson squad authorities, all of whom meticulously scrutinized every possible clue left by a fire in which 'burning birds fell from trees, igniting the ground where they landed.'.