The Wildfire Season is Andrew Pyper's fourth book. Pyper followed Wildfire with four more literary thrillers, the latest The Damned having been published just this year.
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Miles meets Alex while both are university students in Montreal. They fall in love, and begin to plan their life together. After undergraduate studies, Miles McEwan is accepted into medical school in Toronto. "Three months separated them from their futures. For this final summer before...true adulthood, of marriage, Miles headed west one last time to work the wildfire season."<1>
West is British Columbia, where Miles works summers on a forest firefighting crew. Responding to a routine call one day, Miles and his team are suddenly caught in a deadly fire whirl. All the team can do is try to outrun the flames - uphill. "The whirl opened up and new air rushing in to fill the space in a metallic screech, a subway train grinding the rails as it goes too fast around a bend."
Realizing that it's too late for him and another firefighter nicknamed "the kid" to reach safety, Miles decides on a risky Escape Fire manoeuvre. But he cannot convince the kid to join him within the circle of fire he has made with a fusee. "He can only watch as the boy runs on...the kid is consumed by the rushing curtain of fire."
Miles's manoeuvre saves his life. At a price. He has serious, scarring burns, the right side of his face become a "Halloween mask, all hardened latex". Released from hospital, there follow other trials for Miles, of rage, sorrow, guilt and a profound self-loathing. When Alex reveals that she is pregnant with their child, he abandons her, not even leaving the note he had composed, which couldn't "help referring to the kid, the gluttonous melodrama of his own self-pity... in the end he does nothing more than slide his keys under the door after pulling it shut."
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Alex won't be abandoned so easily, however. With their young daughter at her side, Alex spends several years tracking Miles. She finally finds him, in the remote town of Ross River in the Yukon, where Miles has again taken up firefighting with a local crew. The remainder of the novel concerns arson, a fire that threatens all of Ross River, and of course, the resolution between Miles and Alex. Andrew Pyper relates this story as he has all along in The Wildfire Season, with much gripping narrative and evocative prose.
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<1>Pyper, Andrew. The Wildfire Season. HarperCollins, 2005.
