It’s summer in a small, Midwestern city, and babies are burning to death in their cribs under odd circumstances. A number of theories are presented by the six narrators of the novel, but the truth of just what is going on is elusive, and it is up to the reader to discover the truth, since one of the underlying issues of the novel is the difference between knowing and believing. In addition to the babies burning in their cribs, there are other types of burning articulated by the six narrators, everything from a mother whose baby was one of the victims surrounding herself with her paintings of flames engulfing buildings and bodies to a widow who is dealing with her own passions released by the death of her husband to a widower who deals with the dead in a very personal manner to a detective becoming obsessed with solving the crime of the burned babies to an adulterer burning with a passion for the married woman he has been having an affair with to a prophet who sees everything that happens around him in terms of the book of Revelation. Metaphorical and real burning is a part of the lives of each of the six narrators of this novel in which music and art are recurring elements, as is the strange miraculous behavior of memory. Memory and music and art, the novel suggests, can reshape the world as well as haunt us and devastate us and, now and then, save us.
