The Blaze by Chad Dundas

Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons on January 21, 2020

The lost memory plot has been done so often that writers rarely find a way to make it fresh. Setting aside the story’s familiarity, The Blaze generates enough suspense and sets up sufficient drama in the lives of likable characters to earn a recommendation.

Matthew Rose comes home from Iraq with a brain injury. He doesn’t remember his past, which might be for the best. He doesn’t recognize his mother in Florida. When he attempts to contact his estranged father in his hometown of Missoula, he learns that his father has just committed suicide. He travels to Montana to handle the probate and to see if the trip jars any memories.

Matthew learns that he was even more of an asshole during his teen years than are most teens. He was a popular kid until he turned twelve. Then he quit the swimming team, estranged himself from his close friends Scott Dorne and Georgie Porter, and started using drugs. His life was a mess until, at 23, he abruptly joined the army.

Back in Missoula, Matthew reconnects with Georgie, who is now a journalist. He learns that Scott’s father, Chris Dorne, went on to become something of an activist in elective office, exploiting the apparent murder of a boy named Carson Ward as the springboard to a career in local politics. Chris Dorne and Matthew’s father were good friends, but Matthew’s father began a downhill slide just as Chris was getting his life on track. Matthew recalls none of that, but looking at a picture of an old candy store, Matthew has a vague memory of the store in flames. Did Matthew have something to do with the fire?

Matthew happens to stumble upon a burning house and, fixated on the flames, snaps some pictures. The next day he learns that a grad student named Abbie Greene died in the fire. The home that burned down was owned by a lesbian couple, prompting concern that the fire stemmed from a hate crime. A cop’s murder adds to the body count, and a fire at Georgie’s place leaves the reader wondering why Matthew is at the center of so many blazes.

The plot methodically develops connections among characters and events, allowing the reader to piece together clues, some of which misdirect, making it difficult to guess where the plot might be going. We learn its destination when Matthew rather improbably recovers his memory, followed by an information dump that a key character helpfully provides. The plot elements weave together nicely, leaving no threads dangling. The story is ultimately a whodunit, and it succeeds both in concealing the answer and in giving the perpetrator a convincing motive.

The Blaze tells a tight story that creates a moderate degree of suspense. The explanation for Matthew’s youthful change of personality, bursting out in the late information dump, makes it possible to sympathize with him, particularly since he’s a nice enough guy after his head injury. Unlike many thriller writers, Chad Dundas thankfully resists making Matthew a superhero by virtue of his military service. Matthew doesn’t fight much during the novel and when he does fight or chase someone, he isn’t terribly successful. I appreciated that. The characters lack ambiguity — the reader is supposed to like them or not — but that’s true of most thrillers. The self-aggrandizing personality of the novel’s key bad guy makes him easy to dislike. And since the story never pushes the boundaries of credibility too far, it is easy to invest in Matthew’s quest to understand his troubled past.

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