Jared has almost finished writing his next book, Farms Aflame: The Secret World of Rural Arson.

Farms Aflame is the first book to study the shadowy world of stack burning in Aotearoa – the deliberate arson of harvested crops such as wheat, oats, barley and hay. Drawing on a rich archive of newspapers, inquest files, criminal record books and police records, Jared has found over 500 cases of stack burning across Aotearoa between 1860 and 1900. Out of the haze appears undercover detectives, a motley crew of disgruntled farmhands and farmers, insurance fraud and self-arson, and a secret world of rural social antagonism that has been overlooked by past historians. 

A narrative nonfiction with a dash of true crime, this engaging and original book will provide a glimpse into an illicit past, reshaping our understanding of the countryside and the myths Aotearoa continues to tell about itself. And in doing so, it puts a human face on a crime that was far more common than we thought

_{^{Image reference: 1/1-008341-G, Alexander Turnbull Library}}