In the predawn hours of December 12, 1975, an arsonist poured gasoline on the stairs of the Gartland Apartments and touched off one of the worst arson fires in San Francisco history. The brick tenement, riddled with dozens of health and safety code violations and under a two-year-old condemnation order from the City, went up like a "five-story torch," according to first responders. By the time the fire was out,14 people were dead, dozens of SF Firemen and tenants were critically injured, and more than a hundred low-income residents were left homeless. This 33,000 word novel is based on that real event that shocked San Francisco: the Gartland fire arson case has never been solved and more than four decades later nobody knows who set the fire, and why, although it was assumed to be one of a several 'renovation fires' that raced through the low-income apartment buildings in the the Gartland neighborhood in 1975. This real event is brought to life through the eyes of the working-class Sheehan family that has escaped the inner city Irish ghetto of the Mission District and built a new middle-class life, only to find out that their hard scrabble history has moved with them: the rough and ready patriarch "Old John" Sheehan, forced to go to work as a hod carrier at the age of 13 and willing to use his fists on his rebellious son Charlie, a street-fighting hell raiser who defied his father to go to war and returned scarred in body and mind; and Charlie's teenage son Ruaraidh "Rory" Sheehan, trying to finish his senior year in high school and build a life for himself. But when Charlie disappears on his way to work one morning, 'gone missing' as Irish families whisper to each other around the dinner table, Rory's life is turned upside down; his iron-willed Mother Rose demands he 'do his duty' and pushes him out on a nerve-wracking and dangerous search. Rory must come to terms with his conflicting emotions of shame, fear and anger about his scofflaw father, while searching through Mission's seedy bars and byways for his missing father. Under the tutelage of Rory's hard drinking, motorcycle riding godfather Danny Boyle, the search shows the sheltered Rory another side of the city and teaches him lessons in family duty and the demands of a thousand years of Irish tradition. "Sins of the Fathers" is also the story of Jerry Hool, the damaged orphan who was part of a teenage Mission District Irish street gang along with Charlie and Danny; while Charlie went to war, and Danny skirted on the edge of a life in organized crime, Jerry Hool became an arsonist for money, a professional "torch" whose tortured path brings him to the front door of the Gartland Apartments on December 12. Rory believes his search ends when they "raked Charlie Sheehan's smoldering bones out of the Gartland Apartments fire." But, good deeds never go unpunished, and Rory's honorable search, and his attempts to reconcile his love for his father with his anger at the man who abandoned him, is about to come full circle in a stunning surprise ending to "Sins of the Fathers."