The year is 1884. Rolla Alan Jones, an ambitious dreamer fresh out of an East Coast engineering school, is commissioned to design and build the first water system in Spokane Falls, Washington, a booming town of twenty-thousand. He is everyone's golden boy for five years until the city burns down on August 4, 1889. The once-celebrated engineer is scapegoated for the catastrophe alleging his system yielded inadequate water pressure. Asked to resign, betrayed by his friends, shunned by the community, and abandoned by his pregnant wife and three-year-old son, Rolla must find the strength to reinvent himself or return to New York as an abject failure. Based on a true story, Water Fire Steam is a story of forgiveness and redemption for anyone who has ever had to claw their way back from an unwarranted accusation. 

"The initial inebriation snuck up on me with a tickle. Light as a gossamer of steam, I floated about the room, hearing music from every direction. Giddiness suddenly pounced in like a puppy at play. The world was right once more-everything moving in a dandy direction. Laughter bubbled up in me as I moved around the house. Shrieks, whoops, howls, hisses-hysterical laughter flooded in from voices outside my head. They laughed at me. I cackled back. They laughed more. I tee-heed. Everything sounded uproarious until the whisper of Sadie's ghostly voice fell over me."