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David Hugelschaffer clearly knows plenty about fires and firefighters, and well he should. With 10 years in the Alberta Forest Service, including time as a forest firefighter, he has lived the sorts of events that people in his latest mystery fall face-and-eyes into within the first few pages.

One Careless Moment: A Porter Cassel Mystery is the story of a forest fire that kills, and the complicated mystery of how the fire started and why. That's the simplest version of this story, though: There's a lot more about the differences between people, and the lengths to which they will go to meet their own needs.

Sometimes uneven, always on the move, the book is the kind of push-forward mystery that is like the dirt road that opens the book: It makes you want to keep reading, just so you can find out where on Earth the road is going.

Fire investigators are not the typical stuff of mysteries. They're not the hardboiled detectives with a cigar and a gun. Fire investigators work an arcane world of physics and chemistry, a world that speaks of everything from fire load to char patterns to candling.

Technically, the book is extremely sharp, and it's not only in the firefighting descriptions themselves.

Hugelschaffer aptly catches the dynamic between different types of firefighters: the tension between woodland firefighters and small-town volunteer departments that are more familiar with structure fires and car accidents than with the wild energy of forest fires.

He is also able to capture the changing dynamic of firefighters dealing with critical incident stress, and the struggle between two different methods of dealing with that stress: newer psychological debriefing sessions and the more traditional method of drinking to staggering excess.

But it's in capturing that struggle that the book falls into one of its very few pitfalls. In an effort to be complete in its description of the psychological method, the book bogs down in a short menu-listing of things like the stages of grief.

It's helpful information, perhaps, but it doesn't move the story or the mystery forward in any discernible way. It seems to be listed completely and simply for the sake of … well, completeness, and the psychologist who is involved in the process is brought into the story just long enough to be broadly scorned, and never returns to the book again. It's a short span, only a few pages, but it jars the reader away from the story.

And it's not the only part that jars.

A one-page mention of an earlier case solved by the same fire investigator seems tossed in merely as advertisement. It might give someone who enjoys One Careless Moment the urge to find Day Into Night, the first Porter Cassel mystery, but it crops up woodenly, an obligatory one-page hat-tip that disrupts the flow of the book.

There's also language that could have used some diligent pruning in the editing process. Try this sample: "It's a stunning afternoon as I drive the winding highway past the ranger station. The lake is a shimmering blue. Distant mountains look cut out of frosted glass. Achingly white cumulous boil upwards in towers." It may just be me, but that feels like one or two too many "ing" adjectives to digest in a space as short as a third of a paragraph.

It's also not characteristic of the spare, tidy writing that's in evidence in the rest of the book, and that's perhaps why the language sticks out so much.

These are small things, perhaps, but small things that can throw a reader easily. It only takes a few misleading clues to throw any investigator, even a reader, hopelessly off track. All in all, though, these are more quibbles than anything else.

If there's an obvious burn pattern in One Careless Moment, it's that the story really finds its heat in the second two-thirds of the book. From then on, it's a rolling burn with plenty of fuel and wind, and well worth the read. There's even some candling, but you'll probably have to read the book to know just exactly what I mean by that.

Russell Wangersky is an author and former firefighter who now lives in St. John's, and who also occasionally overdoses on adjectives. His most recent book is Burning Down the House: Fighting Fires and Losing Myself.