American Fire: Love, Arson, and Life in a Vanishing Land

In 2012 and 2013, more than seventy fires were deliberately set on Virginia's Eastern Shore, in an economically struggling county where a third of the population lived below the poverty line. Two local residents — a young couple named Charlie Smith and Tonya Bundick — eventually confessed to the arsons, though questions remained about why. Monica Hesse, a Washington Post features writer, went to Accomack County to understand what happened. American Fire tells the story of this isolated community, the people who lived there, the fires that seemed to threaten everything they had, and what drove two people to burn down their own world.