Nina Reilly needs a fresh start. In three years, she's taken on some of
Lake Tahoe's most controversial cases and has turned her struggling
one-woman law firm into a thriving practice. Now she's ready to sort out
her complex relationship with her boyfriend, Monterey P.I. Paul van
Wagoner. So she's heading to the Carmel Valley, the place where she
began her career and where her estranged father lives. It's also a place
of dramatic contradictions and hidden tensions, of new wealth and old
families. And, within days of her arrival, Nina is already feeling the
heat, as a case of arson exposes some of the darkest secrets of her
hometown. Two suspicious fires have already raged through the valley
this summer, igniting suspicions of arson. When a third blaze ends in a
fatality, police zero in on a suspect: Wish, the son of Sandy
Whitefeather, Nina's ex-assistant. The dead man is identified as Wish's
childhood friend, a troubled local auto mechanic who hated the changes
wealthy newcomers had brought to the valley. Nina and Paul are certain
that there is more to this strange case than meets the eye. As they work
together to clear Wish, new, more frightening questions are raised, and
another fire is set. And out of the flames a terrifying picture emerges:
a community steeped in secrets and rage, a tangled history between two
men, and a killer whose motives are dark and wrenching.
