As a series of fires in a small New Hampshire town exposes tensions between summer and year-round residents, the members of one in-between family confront their own desires, limitations and capacities to love in Miller's latest (The Lake Shore Limited, 2010, etc.).Burned out on her transient life working for an NGO in Africa, Frankie takes a possibly permanent leave and comes to stay with her parents, Sylvia and Alfie, in Pomeroy, N.H., where they have recently retired after years of summering there. The night of Frankie's arrival coincides with the town's first house fire, which everyone assumes was an accident. Days later, at the annual Fourth of July tea, Frankie begins a flirtation with Bud, who runs Pomeroy's newspaper, and accompanies him to the site of the fire so he can take pictures. When a second fire occurs, again at a home belonging to summer residents, Bud begins to wonder if arson is involved. Soon there are more firesat least sixand Bud is actively covering the story. Frankie becomes more involved than she'd like after realizing she may have seen the arsonist's car the night of the first fire. Her description helps lead to an arrest. As the investigation meandersone of the least exciting detective stories everFrankie and Bud begin falling in love, though both are in their 40s and on different life paths. But the heart of the story really lies in Sylvia and Alfie's marriage. For years, seemingly super-competent Sylvia has been secretly dissatisfied with her marriage to self-important but only moderately successful college professor Alfie. Now Alfie's mind is failing and she's stuck caring for him. Miller's portrayal of early Alzheimer's and the toll it takes on a family is disturbingly accurate and avoids the sentimental uplift prevalent in issue-oriented fiction. Any spouse who has been there will recognize Sylvia's guilt, anger, protectiveness and helplessness as she watches Alfie deteriorate.While the melodrama fails to ignite, Miller captures all the complicated nuances of a family in crisis. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

IN THE MIDDLE of the night, a jet-lagged woman, unable to sleep, goes for a walk along a country road in the New England town where her family has summered for generations. Frankie Rowley, newly returned from years of relief work in Africa, is certainly lost in the middle of her life's journey, and in a dark night, if not precisely in a dark wood. Unsure of her place in the world, unsure whether she has a place in the world, Frankie has come to Pomeroy, N.H., for a life-reassessment disguised as a visit to her parents, who have decided to live full time in their summer house following her father's retirement from teaching. It's only after a car passes Frankie on the road, its headlights sweeping past in a disorienting arc, that she realizes the smell of smoke has been in the air for some time. Where there's smoke there are fires, and the town in Sue Miller's 10th novel, "The Arsonist," is suddenly full of them, with house after house going up in flames. All the affected houses, moreover, belong to "flatlanders" like Frankie's family, who occupy their older, larger homes during the summer, employ the locals to mow or clean and then return to their real lives in the fall, taking their money with them. Frankie, whose life in Africa included servants and a gated (guarded) expat community, is surely attuned to the conundrum of her family's place in Pomeroy. Her mother might insist that "class has no relevance to our lives. Your father is an intellectual," but the locals don't see it that way. And besides, an even more subtle divide is gradually coming into focus. Among the summer residents of her parents' generation - "poets, bishops, explorers of the human genome, presidents of this college or that" - Frankie's father, Alfie, barely registers. Despite the brand-name education (Hotchkiss and Harvard), the graduate degrees and tenure, his career has been obscure, and though he has never revealed it to his daughter, he is also a resentful social climber, a foster child and scholarship student plagued by "something a little wrong here and there" with his ties and shoes, a man who felt it necessary to "scramble to catch up" with those classmates blessed by money and luck. Alfie has also begun a slow decline into dementia, losing his way along the roads, forgetting things, wandering off. These diminishments and the unabated fires form parallel narrative lines, running alongside the story of Frankie and Bud Jacobs, a Washington journalist who has bought the local paper, as they cautiously begin a relationship. When the police concentrate on a suspect for the serial fire-setting, Bud and Frankie are unpersuaded, and both are burdened by their own suspicions about who might actually be responsible. Miller writes effectively about the tense underpinnings of a summer community, even (especially?) one that has endured a long history of such dualities. When Sylvia, Frankie's mother, gives a check for lawn care to a man with whom she had a long-ago summer romance, or when she castigates his employee, a reclusive teenager who lives in a trailer, it's not just the divide but the history of the divide that resonates. It falls to Pete, the retired editor from whom Bud has purchased The Pomeroy Union, to explain that tensions exist not from the separation of classes ("There was never the expectation that my parents would be invited, say, to a dinner party or anything like that. We knew our place") but from the 1960s incursion of college-educated farmers and carpenters, who brought with them "the idea that class differences weren't right, somehow." The blithe description of vacationing academics and professionals as summer "refugees" irks Frankie, who knows first-hand what real refugees have to endure, but she struggles with her own uprootedness and sudden choices. The novel itself, which is well underway before it discloses its temporal setting in the late 1990s (topics of discussion are the Lewinsky affair and the film "Titanic"), mirrors that quality of a floating interlude, untethered by time. This may be intentional, but it might also irritate readers hoping for a more concrete resolution of Frankie's conundrum, and of the arsonist's identity. "The Arsonist" is full of Miller's signature intelligence about people caught between moral responsibility and a hunger for self-realization, though, like its protagonist, it also feels ultimately unsettled, as if Frankie were still walking her dark country road in a constant, unresolved recalculation. JEAN HANFF KORELITZ is the author of five novels, most recently "You Should Have Known."

A small New Hampshire town provides the backdrop for Miller's (The Senator's Wife) provocative novel about the boundaries of relationships and the tenuous alliance between locals and summer residents when a crisis is at hand. After years of being an aid worker in Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the idyllic Pomeroy, N.H., summer home to which her parents have retired. But all is not well in Pomeroy, where a spate of house fires leaves everyone wary and afraid. Frankie, who may have seen the arsonist her first night home, contemplates her ambiguous future and falls for Bud Jacobs, a transplant who has traded the hustle and bustle of covering politics in D.C. for the security of smalltown life, buying the local newspaper. Meanwhile, Sylvia, Frankie's mother, becomes concerned about her husband's increasingly erratic behavior, fearful that it's a harbinger of Alzheimer's. Liz, Frankie's married sister, has her hands full dealing with their parents while Frankie's been overseas. Miller, a pro at explicating family relationships as well as the fragile underpinnings of mature romance, brilliantly draws parallels between Frankie's world in Africa and her life in New Hampshire, and explores how her characters define what "home" means to them and the lengths they will go to protect it. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Three separate themes share equal billing in this thoughtful, complex tale. An arsonist targets the properties of a New England community's part-time residents, while Frankie Rowley, newly returned from more than a decade abroad and searching for a new role in life, faces the complexities of her father's early Alzheimer's diagnosis. Miller (The Senator's Wife) presents a compelling and realistic view of the effect of Alzheimer's disease on a couple's marriage, the entire extended family, and the family's interactions with friends and neighbors. The author's calm, well-paced, expressive speech provides an enjoyable listening experience. VERDICT Will appeal to fans of the author and literary family stories. ["Miller works her usual storytelling magic, immersing her readers in the powerful cocktail of fear and uncertainty-whether that mixture cracks a once-tight community or threatens the human heart," read the starred review of the Knopf hc, LJ Xpress Reviews, 6/12/14.]-Laurie Selwyn, formerly with Grayson Cty. Law Lib., Sherman, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

With her trademark elegant prose and masterful command of subtle psychological nuance, Miller explores the tensions between the summer people and the locals in a small New Hampshire town. Frankie Rowley, after years spent doing relief work abroad, has returned to her parents' summer home, unsure of whether she will ever go back to East Africa, feeling depleted by that region's seemingly endless suffering. But the reassuring comfort of the small town she has been coming to since she was a girl is shattered by a series of fires set by an arsonist who has targeted the rambling summer homes of the wealthy. Frankie falls into an unexpected and passionate love affair with the local newspaper editor while also becoming privy to her parents' difficulties, with her mother seeming to resent her husband's decline into Alzheimer's, especially since she no longer loves him. The town, awash in fear of the unknown arsonist, splits into factions aligned along class divisions. In this suspenseful and romantic novel, Miller delicately parses the value of commitment and community, the risky nature of relationships, and the yearning for meaningful work. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Miller's new novel has a first printing of 100,000, and her publisher is launching a full-throttle marketing campaign; no surprise for an author with more than 4 million copies of her books sold.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist