Structure

The text is divided into 31 sections, including chapters, a preface, acknowledgements, and notes. Each chapter has a unique title. The chapters also vary in length. The third chapter, for example, is 14 pages long, while the twenty-third chapter is only two pages long. This is due to the different amount of content that Hesse chooses to address, by topic, in each section. The longer chapters tend to do with past events, such as the history of the town, the happenings of the fires, or the legal proceedings during the trials. They are divided in a myriad of ways, sometimes by topic and sometimes by character. The shorter chapters are focused on specific objects or succinct events, such as the Amazon-published book Burned or the geographic profiler’s conclusions about the case.

Though the novel is meant to cover a single plot, beginning to end, Hesse does not do...