David Baer­wald is a song­writer, musi­cian, per­former, and film com­pos­er who has col­lab­o­rat­ed with Joni Mitchell, Rick­ie Lee Jones, Sheryl Crow, Hans Zim­mer, and Baz Luhrmann. Baer­wald spent a for­ma­tive part of his child­hood in Tokyo and Los Ange­les and cur­rent­ly lives in the Hud­son Val­ley. This is his first nov­el. Based on the life of author David Baerwald’s grand­fa­ther, The Fire Agent is an aston­ish­ing work of fic­tion that takes us from the ide­al­ism of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry Ger­man sci­ence to the dawn­ing of chem­i­cal war­fare; from Japan’s Yakuza to FDR’s bou­tique spy shops; from the rise of fas­cism in Japan and Ger­many to America’s glob­al dom­i­nance at the dawn of the Cold War. A haunt­ing nov­el about the weight of inher­i­tance and the impos­si­ble deci­sions we face that can lead us to destroy what we love most, it has deep