Scorch

She left Kettle Creek, West Virginia, at seventeen with bandages on her wrists and no intention of ever coming back.

Ten years later, Nora Voss is a fire investigator for the state of Oregon - methodical, controlled, and very good at reading the damage other people leave behind. When her mother dies, Nora returns to the small Appalachian town that nearly destroyed her. She gives herself three days. Bury her mother. Handle the house. Get out.

But Kettle Creek has other plans.

Caleb Vane - the boy who systematically dismantled her life in high school - now wears the sheriff's badge his corrupt father left behind. He's bigger, harder, haunted by a guilt he's been carrying for a decade. He's also been mowing her dead mother's lawn, watering her marigolds, and leaving his coffee mug in her kitchen sink. Nora didn't come home to forgive him. She came home to burn his world to the ground.

Then the fires start.

An arsonist is working through the county - diesel accelerant, identical burn patterns, escalating targets. When Nora's childhood home goes up in flames on her third night back, destroying a journal full of secrets her mother spent years collecting, Nora realizes the fires aren't random. They're connected to the same buried truth that almost killed her at seventeen. And at the center of it all is a name her mother wrote again and again - not Caleb's.

Tommy Sisk.

Now Nora has a choice: take the Monday flight back to Portland and leave the past in the ashes where it belongs, or stay in the town that tried to erase her and do what she was trained to do - find the origin point, trace the burn, and expose every person who lit a match.

She cancels the flight.

What follows is a collision between a woman who came home for revenge and a man who has been destroying himself in her absence. Between the need to uncover the truth and the danger of getting too close to the fire. Between the girl Nora used to be and the woman she became - sharp, fearless, and unwilling to burn for anyone but herself.