(FORTUNE Magazine) – California Fire and Life by Don Winslow Knopf, 337 pages

Following up his popular thriller The Death and Life of Bobby Z, Don Winslow sets the difficulty meter on scary-high with a new novel that aims to portray the insurance biz as adventurous and hip. It's a tall order--Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity was hardly dashing--but Winslow succeeds with Jack Wade. Surf hound, ex-cop, and claims adjuster with a steel-wool personality, Wade rubs everybody wrong.

California Fire and Life is set in the surfer's paradise of Dana Point, a once sleepy small town south of Los Angeles. A hometown boy who grew up riding Hobie longboards, Jack was an arson investigator for the sheriff's department until he got caught in one of those moral crossfires--go by the book or risk a witness' life--that swell the ranks of unemployed cops in books and movies. After that incident, California Fire & Life is the only employer who'll touch him, so Wade ends up tracking down little old ladies' missing spoon collections. When a beautiful cliff house goes up in flames, he's poking through the ashes. The fire was so hot that the lady of the house, Pamela Vale, melted into the bedsprings. Wade's old partner in the Sheriff's office rules it an accidental fire and death caused by booze and smoking in bed. The victim's husband, Nicky Vale, who's toting up his insurance payout before the embers are cold, agrees. Of course, Wade thinks otherwise.

Winslow, who spent 15 years working with arson investigators, delivers a pocket-sized course in the physics of combustion. We learn how "alligator char," "pour patterns," and "fuel loads" provide the key to the C&O (cause and origin) of a blaze. He threads these tidbits through a story that zooms from the palmy latitudes of Southern California to a Russian prison. Winslow knows a lot, but he also knows just how much to dish out for that dead-on factual feel. The hard-core science makes Wade an irresistible hybrid; he's a hipster wonk in a madras lab coat. Winslow's slangy, sly prose reflects the mix--he describes one firebug's hairline as having "retreated like a French army."

California Fire and Life has as many twists and turns as the Pacific Coast Highway where Wade burns rubber in his vintage Mustang. As with most tangled plots, the ending arrives a little too smoothly. But smooth is Winslow's style. (He favors single-sentence, sometimes single-word, paragraphs, as in "Dude.") This telegraphic, wised-up storytelling has been compared with Elmore Leonard's, and the pairing is well deserved. Winslow shrewdly lends to insurance industry grunts the flair with which Leonard smartens up mobsters. The result is a premium read.

--Albert Mobilio

ALBERT MOBILIO is a freelance writer based in New York City