The 320ci Fireball Eight had a 3 7/16th bore and stroke of 4 5/16. Just carry your measuring tape to the cruise night to figure out what family you’re looking at. The 320ci variant was in a block 34.5 inches long and the smaller variants like the 221, 230, 233, 235, 278, and even the larger 345 were built off a block that was 31.25 inches long. What do we mean by “big” engine? Well there were two different blocks used to make the straight eight. This displacement was produced during the 1936-1952 time frame and it powered the more luxurious and high end cars of the Buick lineup. They were made in varying displacements and even varying block sizes but the one most people think about when this engine family is brought up is the 320ci “big” engine of the family. From a Buick 8 is a novel about our fascination with deadly things, about our insistence on answers when there are none, about terror and courage in the face of the unknowable.From 1931 through 1953 the Buick straight eight really made its mark in the American automotive landscape. Like his father, Ned wants answers, and the secret begins to stir, not only in the minds and hearts of the veteran troopers who surround him, but in Shed B as well. One day he looks in the window of Shed B and discovers the family secret. Sandy Dearborn, Sergeant Commanding, knows it's the boy's way of holding onto his father, and Ned is allowed to become part of the Troop D family. In the fall of 2001, a few months after Curt Wilcox is killed in a gruesome auto accident, his 18-year-old boy Ned starts coming by the barracks, mowing the lawn, washing windows, shoveling snow. Over the years the troop absorbed the mystery as part of the background to their work, the Buick 8 sitting out there like a still life painting that breathes - inhaling a little bit of this world, exhaling a little bit of whatever world it came from. Curt's avid curiosity taking the lead, they investigated as best they could, as much as they dared.

A few hours later, when Rafferty vanished, Wilcox and his fellow troopers knew the car was worse than dangerous - and that it would be better if John Q. Curt Wilcox knew old cars, and he knew immediately that this one was.wrong, just wrong. The state police of Troop D in rural Pennsylvania have kept a secret in Shed B out back of the barracks ever since 1979, when Troopers Ennis Rafferty and Curtis Wilcox answered a call from a gas station just down the road and came back with an abandoned Buick Roadmaster.

From a buick 8 car