Ash and Asphalt. A Twisty Domestic Thriller of an Inside Job, a Deadly Reunion, and the Secret She Can't Outrun

She was eight years old when the fire took her brother. The report said cause undetermined. Lena Marquez never believed it. She remembers the smell that didn't belong in a house. Gasoline. She remembers the front door that wouldn't open. She remembers standing barefoot on the wet grass while the roof came down on Mateo. So she spent fifteen years learning how fire talks. Burn patterns.
Accelerants. The story charred wood leaves behind. Now she's back in Laurel Springs, California, a contractor for the state fire marshal, and the fires won't stop. Three in a year. All within a mile. All blamed on the dry season and the wind. Lena doesn't blame the wind. Because every scorch pattern points the same direction it pointed the night her house burned. Toward something deliberate.
Toward someone who knows exactly how to make a crime look like an accident. The deeper she digs, the closer it gets. A locked box. A ledger. A necklace that should have burned with the rest. Someone is watching her work the scenes. Someone is leaving fires for her to find. And the one man who keeps showing up at the edge of the tape, the one who makes her forget to keep her guard up, might be the only person who believes her. Or the reason she'll never make it out. Then a deputy looks her dead in the eye and says the thing she's spent her whole life refusing to hear: "Lena, what if there was never anything to find?" She has one case left to close. The case that's really about a little girl on a cold lawn, counting the seconds, waiting twenty-three years for the truth. If Lena Marquez wants to bury the past, first she has to walk back into the fire. Ash and Asphalt is a tense, twisty romantic suspense thriller about a childhood tragedy, a serial arsonist, a deadly homecoming, a buried family secret, slow-burn danger, and a truth that refuses to stay in the ground. Perfect for readers who love small-town arson mysteries, smoldering romantic suspense, a haunted heroine, an inside-job conspiracy, and a twisty thriller with a hard-won happy ending.
A standalone suspense with an ending you won't see coming.