"I have spent years going over our past, untangling memories from dreams, trying to pinpoint the exact moment when fate sealed. The easiest place to start is with the most blatant mistake: our mother, Jenny, kept the matchbooks in the junk drawer." So begins Andrea and her brother Delphie's story, a story of the light and darkness visited upon their lives by the flaring of one small flame. Twenty years after pyromaniac Delphie kills a family of four, he is released from prison to Andrea's care. Soon after, she finds her carefully ordered life coming apart. Her efforts to keep her brother on a steady path lead her off course, into the secret corners of New York, where danger is difficult to gauge and a spark, once ignited, is hard to extinguish. "It's clear to me that Courtney Elizabeth Mauk is going to be an important new voice of her generation." -Dan Chaon, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake