Into the Fire

By Manda Scott, Penguin Random House, 2015, 573 pages
Reviewed by Janet Cleaveland, Nov. 18, 2020

Here’s the promise on the back cover of Manda Scott’s “Into the Fire”: “There is a secret hidden within a body, burning within the flames, that will change history forever.”

And here’s the challenge to the reader: “Fire” is two novels in one — a historical thriller from the Hundred Years War (1337-1453) involving Joan of Arc, and a 2014 crime investigation centering on Captain Inès Picaut of Orléans, France. The chapters move back-and forth, bridging 600 years and requiring heavy-duty concentration.

I knew that Scott, a veterinary surgeon in the U.K., specialized in writing about strong women. She has a series about Boudica, the warrior queen who defended Britain against Roman rule in the year 60 or 61. When I read the glowing blurbs inside “Into the Fire,” I thought, “Why not?”

When I finished the novel, however, I reread the unabashed praise and asked, “Why didn’t I react that way?”

(Case in point: “ ‘Into the Fire’ is in a word magnificent,” gushed Ben Kane, a novelist who specializes in historical fiction. “Page turning. Visceral. Mesmerizing. Evocative — it’s so evocative. It’s filthy-nailed, sweat-stained, blood drenched, gut-wrenching, tear-inducing, passion-wrenching,” he wrote. “Beat that,” Kane screamed at me. “I won’t even try,” I yelled back.)

Critics and their swooning comments aside, I rather liked “Fire” once I settled into the odd, but intriguing, structure and figured out that the two tales would eventually mesh and that the characters would display similarities in their humanity that would span the centuries.

I took my cue from Captain Picaut’s police training as she thought about the death of a mystery man who had swallowed a memory card in a desperate attempt to leave a clue: “Yesterday it rained and today, here, now, the Loire is gorged to fullness. But it was not raining last night when the fire was lit. The arsonists have one eye on the weather forecast, which, if nothing else, is part of a pattern and it is in patterns that answers are found.”

At that point, I decided to look for the parallels and patterns to make sense of the novel. (I had 500 pages to go, after all.) “Fire” required mountains of research and thinking about medieval warfare, alliances and spying operations. I admired Scott for that. The book delved into terrorism, immigration, the far right and an election in our day, so I connected with that.

The answers at the end, however, surprised me — both the historic and the modern. I plan to read the next book in Picaut the series, “A Treachery of Spies,” about the Resistance and the Nazi occupation of France, and the modern-day murder of a woman in Orléans.

The connection? Her death has all the markings of traitors to the Resistance in World War II.

But I’m not going anywhere near the critics’ comments.