After the Fire Season

by Ian Troxell

Publisher - BookBaby

Category - General Novel

When the state sends emergency recovery manager Mara Vale to Crestview — a small Sierra Nevada town still raw from the largest wildfire in its recorded history — she expects the familiar weight of disaster: the grief, the bureaucratic chaos, the slow and complicated work of rebuilding. What she doesn't expect is Daniel Mercer. The investigative journalist has been in Crestview for three weeks when Mara arrives, and he has already found the thread of something deeply wrong. Federal recovery funds are being used to build a road no fire survivor needs. Land is being taken from elderly families through fraud and intimidation. And a debris removal worker who saw something on the access road one October evening is dead — his brake system certified fully operational seven days before it failed. Mara and Daniel have a history. Ten years of it, ending in the specific and painful way that things end when two people who love each other make choices they can't take back. Now they are in the same small town, working in parallel toward the same dangerous truth, and the professional terms they have agreed to are holding for exactly as long as the work allows. What they find together is bigger and darker than either of them anticipated. What they find in each other is the thing they stopped being careful about too late to stop. After the Fire Season is a story about accountability, resilience, and two serious people who are very good at their jobs finally deciding that competence is not the same as caution.

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