HOUSE ON FIRE provides thriller readers --- and everyone else --- with the opportunity to welcome back Nick Heller. This long-running PI series combines Joseph Finder’s penchant for utilizing high finance and business topics with tantalizing takes on the mystery genre. Heller is a bit of an enigma. He keeps his agency off the radar, if not on the down-low, by relying on word of mouth and naming his agency “Heller Associates — Actuarial Consulting Services” to cut down on the foot traffic, a tactic that undoubtedly works. Accordingly, he takes only those cases in which he is interested, even if he is not always in a financial position to do so.

That said, Heller’s world is rocked in the book’s early pages when he finds out that his old friend, Sean Lenehan, has passed away suddenly. Sean was more than a buddy; he saved Heller’s life when both men were members of the U.S. Special Forces A-team. He became addicted to opioids after leaving the service, but had been clean for nearly a year, which is why Heller is dismayed to learn that he died of a drug overdose.

"Finder utilizes his extensive research abilities with current events to make HOUSE ON FIRE yet another winner in this series.... Fans of financial thrillers and private-eye fiction will find much to love here."

At Sean’s funeral, Heller is approached by a woman named Susan Kimball. Susan is the daughter of Conrad Kimball, the founder of Kimball Pharmaceutical, the developer and manufacturer of the opioid drug that Sean had overdosed on. She has made a practice of attending the funerals of individuals who have died from overdosing on the drug that her father’s company has manufactured. Her aim is to become a whistleblower by exposing her father for burying a report that was produced before the release of the drug, which concluded that it was dangerously addictive. Consequently, hundreds of thousands of people have died, including Sean.

Susan wants to retain Heller to find the report so she can prove that her father and Kimball Pharmaceutical knew about the drug’s dangerous propensities but released it anyway to an unsuspecting public. Heller accepts the assignment. It is both an interesting and a deadly one. A copy of the report is supposedly secreted away in Conrad’s home office, so Heller attends Conrad’s birthday party as Susan’s guest in order to gain access to the premises.

Finder uses this occasion to rachet up the suspense and make the stakes even more personal for Heller when an unexpected encounter results in a suspicious tragedy --- or perhaps a deliberate homicide. Heller puts himself in danger when he goes the extra mile to retrieve the elusive report, which leads to a conclusion that uses a traditional mystery setting with a twist to expose some surprising secrets.

Finder utilizes his extensive research abilities with current events to make HOUSE ON FIRE yet another winner in this series. There are subtle but significant parallels displayed between Heller and Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe, with enough differences incorporated into Finder’s creation to make him utterly unique. Fans of financial thrillers and private-eye fiction will find much to love here.