Charlie is a journalist in the war zone of the Balkans. He witnessed a brutal attack on a woman, who was deliberately set on fire. Although he was able to put out the flames and get her to medical help the event was devastating for Charlie. He becomes obsessed with finding and killing the perpetrator. Ignatieff portrays the horrors of war in an introspective way, not with the broad strokes of daily news, information that ironically is supplied by crews like Charlie's. This is a short read, but hard to put down. ( )

In the collective imagination, the name Kosovo conjures up hellish images of violence, terror, brutality and death. Drawing on his expert knowledge and first-hand experience of war zones, Michael Ignatieff's short novel "Charlie Johnston In The Flames", set during the war in Kosovo, is a moving, disturbing account of one man's agonising experience of the evils of war.

Veteran TV war correspondent, Charlie Johnston, has decades of "holiday from hell" assignments behind him, covering harrowing events in the trouble-spots of the world. Jaded by the carnage he is professionally paid to witness and exposure to all forms of appalling brutality and futile, violent death, Charlie thought he had seen it all: mutilated bodies, burnt-out buildings, fire-gutted villages, sobbing women, wretched orphans - until he sees a vision from hell! Returning from a risky cross-border trip into war-torn Kosovo, he and his cameraman sidekick, Jacek, eyewitness a horrifying atrocity of the kind that marks the moral malaise of our age: a young Kosovar village woman who sheltered them is doused with a jerry-can of gasoline and touched to flame with the flick of the lighter of a militia patrol commander - the commander caught on film by Jacek and later identified as a Serbian army colonel.

Ignatieff shows how the effects of this shock-horror experience can blight the life of even such a battle-hardened war reporter as Charlie. The horror of seeing the young woman burned alive before his eyes - one senseless killing too many - gets to Charlie, penetrates his protective shell of detachment, his gut-reaction being to track down and wreak vengeance on the colonel ... or at least confront him in person about his motivation for the killing.

The theme of revenge resonates through this novel. Charlie himself appears to have ambivalent feelings about the subject: he is painfully aware that the burning compulsion he feels for retribution and revenge - and is powerless to check - is anachronistic and contradictory to his respect for human rights. Yet such is his sense of outrage at the colonel's casual, diabolical act of violence that he feels "an instinct for vengeance can burn through an educated respect for human rights". Like a thriller, the plot creates expectation that there will be a day of reckoning for the colonel in a showdown with the avenging Charlie.

The inspired title, "Charlie Johnston In The Flames", encapsulates all the troubles that afflict Charlie. For Charlie, being "in the flames" takes many shapes and forms: his bandaged hands have been literally engulfed in flames; metaphorically, flames of anger and revenge burn deeply within him; his dreams are haunted by images of the torched village woman; mentally, he is strung up by the weight of the incident pressing on his mind, and from the emotional fall-out of a marriage under pressure. For Charlie Johnston, being "in the flames" can mean many different things - as the dramatic, unexpected denouement of this novel reveals when the moment of truth arrives.