I like Ellory, but he seems to be obsessed with the murder of teenage girls (see no.1054). This approaches the same issue from a different angle.
Jack, the central figure, leaves a desolate Canadian town in his early twenties, abandoning a younger brother and a girl whom he has promised to rescue but never does. Twenty (?) years later, working as a fire investigator in Montreal, he gets a call saying his brother has been arrested for a near-lethal assault back in their hometown, where some girls had been murdered before Jack left. Reluctantly he returns there and his brother has been charged with assaulting a man he is convinced was responsible for the killings. Jack is determined to resolve the position, and eventually, after a lot of plot complexities, does so, using his fire investigator skills cleverly to entrap the perpetrator. He probably gets back together with the abandoned girlfriend as well.
Good as a crime novel, but a bit lightweight apart.
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