SUMMARY
“Good morning all you FFOPS. In case you’re wondering what that means, it’s ‘Fire Fighters on Probation’. You may have heard our new people are called recruits or rookies or probies or I don’t know what else, but to me, you’re just FFOPS and I mean that in the most derogatory fashion you can imagine.” Lieutenant Brunick, Instructor, Boston Fire Academy
Before you can become a Jake on the Boston Fire Department, you have to be a Ffop (Fire fighter on probation). Ffops is the chronicle of a new class of recruits and their introduction to the profession of fire fighting. Stapleton has created a host of new characters: Donald Holden, Gulf War vet who has wanted to be a jake since he was a kid; Cueball Justice, a funny, wise-cracking guy with a slightly inflated ego; Goat Hitchcock, over fifty and the oldest member of the class; and many other fascinating rookies, instructors, and jakes. Who will survive the grueling ten-week program at the Training Academy? How will they be received at their company assignments? How will they perform at actual fires? Will they be able to complete their first year and become permanent Boston fire fighters? A number of other Stapleton jakes make their appearance for the first time in this novel, and they are at least the equals of those we have met in the past. Outrageous? Certainly. Dedicated? Always. Good jakes? Absolutely. Plenty of fires? Enough to satisfy the desires of the most devoted aficionados. The fires in Ffops are based on actual incidents as Stapleton continues his efforts to share his knowledge of fires and how to control them.
Ffops is Book 1 in a 5 part series that chronicles Donald Holden’s rise in the Boston Fire Department from Ffop to Deputy.