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Kerosene
Paperback
Publisher: Maren Ashby
Published: May 17 2026
Pages: 238
Weight: 0.53
Height: 0.54 Width: 5.00 Depth: 8.00
Language: English
Nora Bellamy investigates fires for a living. She reads burn patterns the way other people read books - methodically, fluently, without flinching. It's the only career that made sense for a woman who lost her brother in a house fire at sixteen and spent the next fifteen years trying to understand why things burn.
Now the Oregon State Fire Marshal's Office is sending her back to Harlan - the small timber town she fled as a teenager. A construction site has been torched on the exact piece of land where her childhood home once stood. Three pour points. Kerosene accelerant. Professional execution. Someone who understands fire set this blaze, and they wanted the building gone.
But the property isn't just a crime scene. Beneath the charred framing and twisted rebar lies the old foundation - the concrete slab where Nora's family lived, where her twelve-year-old brother Danny drew birds in his sketchbook, where a fire took everything in eleven minutes on an October night fifteen years ago.
And Levi Cain is here.
The boy Nora loved at seventeen - the boy who vanished without a word the night of the fire - is now a structural engineer working on the very project that burned. He has an alibi. He has answers he won't give. And he watches her across the diner counter like a man who's been holding his breath for fifteen years, waiting for permission to exhale.
As Nora digs into the new fire, she uncovers a pattern that stretches back two decades. Seven arsons across the county. Same accelerant. Same method. All connected to one man: Ray Cain - Levi's father. A violent, feared figure who has been burning buildings for insurance money while an entire town looked the other way.
But the deeper Nora goes, the more the old fire and the new fire begin to merge. Suppressed witness statements surface. A fire chief confesses to coaching testimony. Evidence long buried in a filing cabinet reveals that someone was inside her house the night it burned - running toward the flames, not away from them.
Levi wasn't running from the fire. He ran into it. He tried to save Danny. He failed. He was burned. And his father made him disappear.
The truth Nora has spent her career circling is not about arson or insurance fraud or a twenty-year criminal operation. It's about a candle she left burning on a windowsill, a cotton curtain three inches from the flame, and twenty minutes she could never account for. Everyone knew. No one told her. And now, standing on the ashes of everything she built to protect herself from knowing, she has to decide what survives - the wall she constructed between herself and the truth, or the man who carried her brother out of the fire and has been carrying the weight of it ever since.
KEROSENE is a searing psychological thriller about guilt, silence, and the fires we set without knowing it - the ones that burn underground for years, shaping the landscape above, until the day the ground finally opens and the heat rises and there is nowhere left to run.
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