Showing Blaze: The Forensics of Fire by Nicholas Faith

Fires start, or are started, and the evidence of how it happened, and how it spread, is likely to burn with the rest of the building. Yet if fires are to be prevented and if arsonists are to be caught, techniques have to be found to sift through the ashes for that evidence. Nicholas Faith's book, based on the Channel Four series, takes us through those techniques and introduces us to the forensic experts who apply them. We learn how computer modelling has made it possible to understand the apparent paradoxes of fire--why sudden flares will trap and kill one person and not the person in the next room. There is a folk myth that people panic and trample each other-- Faith explains the extent to which this is mere mythology and how well most people have behaved in the direst of emergencies. He takes us in detail through some of the fires of modern times--Kings Cross, Our Lady of Angels--and the lessons learned from them. And we learn about the people who take the most terrible of risks to save others from fire as well as the awful drives which lead some people, including renegade fire fighters, to kill people in this most awful of ways. --Roz Kaveney