Fire on the Island: A Romantic Thriller

Set against the very real refugee crisis on the beautiful, sun-drenched Greek islands, Fire on the Island paints a nuanced and loving portrait of a community in crisis while shedding light on the challenges of life in contemporary Greece.

After a string of mysterious fires breaks out on a small Greek island, undercover FBI agent Nick Damigos arrives to investigate, showing up just in time to save a beloved truffle-sniffing dog from the most recent inferno. But as Nick searches for the arsonist responsible, he finds himself navigating a community rife with conflicts, some of which go back generations. As the threat of the next fire looms, Nick begins to uncover the villagers’ countless buried secrets. But Nick has secrets too, and as he falls for a young bartender who becomes his prime suspect, he becomes entrenched in the very mystery he’s trying to solve. With time running out to prevent catastrophe, will Nick expose the truth and save the village, or will the island be engulfed in a blaze of vengeance and heartbreak?

Raised crisscrossing America pulling a small green trailer behind the family car, Timothy Jay Smith developed a ceaseless wanderlust that has taken him around the world many times. En route, he’s found the characters that people his work. Polish cops and Greek fishermen, mercenaries and arms dealers, child prostitutes and wannabe terrorists, Indian Chiefs and Indian tailors: he’s hung with them all in an unparalleled international career that saw him smuggle banned plays from behind the Iron Curtain, maneuver through Occupied Territories, represent the U.S. at the highest levels of foreign governments, and stowaway aboard a ’devil’s barge’ for a three-day crossing from Cape Verde that landed him in an African jail.

Tim brings the same energy to his writing that he brought to a distinguished career, and as a result, he has won top honors for his novels, screenplays and stage plays in numerous prestigious competitions.

• Fire on the Island won the Gold Medal in the 2017 Faulkner-Wisdom Competition for the Novel, and his screenplay adaptation of it was named Best Indie Script by WriteMovies.
• Istanbul Crossing won the Leapfrog Global Fiction Prize in 2023.
• Another novel, The Fourth Courier, set in Poland, published in 2019, received tremendous reviews.
• Previously, he won the Paris Prize for Fiction (now the Paris Literary Prize) for his novel, A Vision of Angels.
• Kirkus Reviews called Cooper’s Promise ＂literary dynamite＂ and selected it as one of the Best Books of 2012.
• Tim was nominated for the 2018 Pushcart Prize.

He’s an avid theater-goer and playwright himself. His stage play, How High the Moon, a gay love story set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, won the prestigious Stanley Drama Award.

He is the founder of the Smith Prize for Political Theater.