Jeffrey Brown:

Orlean's book is part history, of a beautiful building in downtown L.A. filled with architectural and artistic detail that first opened in 1926, and the colorful characters who were key to its development.

And it's part whodunit, focused on a would-be actor named Harry Peak with a penchant for lying. The 1986 fire, Orlean tells us, started in the fiction area, and spread through the building, burning for seven hours, reaching temperatures of more than 2,000 degrees, before firefighters could put it out.

The rare books room where Orlean and I met looked like this; 32 years later, some of the books back on the shelves are still scarred.

So, you can see the soot.