Prairie Fire is a novel that takes place in the Fall of 1958 in and around Chicago, Ill. The main characters are four boys that attend, Bishop Malloy, a Catholic High School on Chicago's west side. Two are freshmen, an unlikely pair that become friends. Tony Barbini is a carefree son of an Irish mother and Italian father who is a savvy streetwise captain with the Chicago Police Department. Andrew Sikorski is a son of nuclear scientist and is haunted by the suicide death of his Polish mother when he was eight years old. Andrew has a brilliant mind and needs order in his life. He is the complete opposite of Tony, but circumstances bring them together. The other two boys are seniors on the Malloy football team, the favorite to win the city championship in the traditionally strong Chicago Catholic Conference. Mike Bonjonovich, the son of an unscrupulous restaurant supply company owner with mob ties, is possibly the most talented quarterback ever to play football in Chicago. He is also mean with a vicious temper. Idolizing Mike is an insecure Johnny Costello, his center, whose father is a blowhard hard-drinking Chicago Park District attendant. The boys all come together inadvertently on the first day of classes with the two seniors taking an instant dislike for Tony, and thus Andrew.
Integral in the story are the ambitious head coach, Frank O'Brien, who sees the city championship as a pathway to a coaching job at a major college and his young assistant, Jack Stone, who would also like a college job so he could afford to live in a more desirable and safer environment than he currently is living. But Stone has questions of what values he might have to give up for this to happen. Also prominent in the story are priests at Malloy. A worldly and highly educated principal, who would prefer to return to his role as a Church historian, must deal with the pressures of a forceful Fathers' Club that wants the city championship at all costs, in addition to a pair of sadistic priests that present problems of a sort that he would like to believe don't exist.
The driver of the story is a tragic fire in a prairie that takes the lives of three young boys. The investigation of the deaths, at first believed to be accidental, leads to students at Malloy and threatens the chances of Malloy taking the championship and thus major scholarship offers to the players and college coaching positions for the coaches. The worst comes out in many, especially the fathers of Costello and Bonjanovich, who are pressing that their sons get major college scholarships and under-the-table payoffs that they expect to come with it. Bonjanovich's mob connections come into play and the potential outcome of the situation can become deadly. An unexpected hero is the school janitor, a Polish death camp survivor, maligned by the football players, but actually quite astute in his ways.
The on-going story and the climax brings out both the best and the worst in people.
