Jack Emery is an Australian reporter embedded with a set of US Marines in Afghanistan. When a roadside bomb kills four soldiers and the culprit gives himself up, Jack finds that there is more to this than meets the eye. With a story in the offing he heads to a US Marines outpost to discover the truth. When he finds that routine beatings and torture have become commonplace, he knows he must get the story out. But quickly uploading the story to somewhere secure isn’t enough to stop him being picked up by groups who do not want the truth to be revealed. Having been captured, Jack finds himself suffering the same treatment he is trying to report on, as they try to find out what he knows. Even when he is rescued by the Australian Embassy, Jack still finds himself in danger in trying to pursue the story further as several shadowy forces want to make sure he never reports on what he has found.

Fireplay is a short prequel to the Jack Emery series and gives an opening look at the journalist and the world he lives in. The plot dives in quickly giving a brief overview of the setting during the Afghanistan war and doesn’t let up through the rest of the story. The story is quite open about the brutality that is inflicted and lengths that people will go to cover it up, all in the name of doing the right thing. While it may be short, the author does an excellent job of sketching out each scene and letting it play long enough to be effective before moving to the next scene. The only character who is true to the reader is Jack and he comes across as the brash investigative journalist trying to do what’s right. Everyone else has their own agenda in play and the reader is left to guess at what machinations are going on in the background. The writing style help to keep the pace up and guides the reader swiftly from scene to scene without letting up. It would be easy to say the characters are a little black and white in their actions, but there is enough ambiguity for it not to be an easy crutch for the story to lean on.

As for the book itself, the formatting and layout of the book are fine and there is an excerpt from the first novel to give a taster of where it will go next and some details if you want to see what else the author is up to.

Overall, it’s a fast paced short story, that left me turning the pages to see what happens next. Fans of the genre should certainly enjoy it.