Saving Troy is a compelling and unique chronicle of a year with professional firefighters and paramedics in a down-at-the-heels, rust-belt city. The author rode along with the members the Troy Fire Department’s 1st Platoon, and he has fashioned a vivid story that takes the reader not only inside the action but to the dramatic core of every call he re-creates for us --- so close you can almost hear the heart monitor’s buzz. Mr. Patrick has used his fictional know-how, as well as a screenwriter’s ear for dialogue, to craft this new non-fiction narrative that is unsurpassed in the literature of firefighting.

Dennis Smith, who is perhaps America’s best-known firefighter and who is the author of Report from Engine Co. 82 and Report from Ground Zero, has called Saving Troy “an important, exciting, and extremely-well-done narrative.”

William B. Patrick is a writer whose works have been published or produced in several genres: creative non-fiction, poetry, fiction, screenwriting, and drama. His works include Fire Ground, a screenplay based on his experiences living and riding with professional firefighters; We Didn't Come Here for This, a hybrid of creative non-fiction and poetry published in 1999; Rescue, a radio play which aired world-wide on BBC in 1997; These Unpraised Hands, a book of narrative poems and dramatic monologues published by BOA Editions in 1995; Rachel's Dinner, a teleplay which was aired nationally on ABC-TV in 1991; and Brand New Me, a feature-length screenplay optioned by Force Ten Productions of Los Angeles. William Patrick’s novel, Roxa: Voices of the Culver Family, won the 1990 Great Lakes Colleges Fiction Award, placing him in a line of well-known fiction writers that includes Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, Jane Hamilton, and Alice Munro.

William Patrick has taught the writing of fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, and poetry at the University at Albany, the College of St. Rose, Old Dominion University, Salem State College, and Onondaga Community College. Since 1996, he has served four times as Writer-in-Residence for the New York State Writer's Institute at the University at Albany, teaching courses in screenwriting, adapting short stories for the screen, and fiction and film. Mr. Patrick founded and teaches at The New York State Summer Young Writers Institute in Silver Bay, NY. He works each year with middle and high school students in the Adirondacks for The Writer’s Voice at Silver Bay, and he has taught screenwriting at the Chautauqua Institute and at Raybrook Federal Correctional Center.