Showing Burnout by Jeannine Kadow

Fire. Fire burns the flesh, sears the soul, and scorches dreams. Lacie Wagner knows fire. She has the scars to prove it. And the nightmares. Nightmares that began with the horrific childhood accident that took her father’s life. Nightmares filled with a strange man’s pale face and ragged whisper promising her death by fire, the very thing she fears most.

Reach out and touch the fire, Lacie. The Dead Time is coming.

Her hands were destroyed in a long ago summer fire. And now Lacie, a hard-hitting television anchor in Washington D.C., keeps her ravaged hands hidden from prying eyes. But one cold Thanksgiving weekend, as snow falls on the city, Lacie’s nightmare ignites into a terrifying reality.

It happens on the heels of a breaking news story about another woman’s tragedy: a U.S. Navy officer who has plunged to her death in the frigid Bering Sea. A woman Lacie knew the summer of the fire, a lifetime ago. Then, Lacie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, visiting her father in New York City for the holiday, disappears without a trace.

Reach out and touch the fire, Lacie. The Dead Time is coming.

A digital video arrives in the mail and suddenly (felete underline) Lacie’s nightmare voice is suddenly all too real. It is a living breathing ragged whisper narrating the grisly images of Lacie’s daughter’s fiery death, warning her that the Dead Time is here.

Lacie’s nightmare man unleashes a firestorm of terror, determined to destroy everyone and everything in her life. Turned away by police who do not believe her, Lacie reaches out to Jack Stein, an iconoclastic FBI loner who breaks rules and breaks cases. A man driven by his own haunting secrets, Jack Stein is determined to save Lacie and find a killer who is a master of illusion. Stein is a killer hunter but he has never come up against a killer like this.

The key to his identity is locked in Lacie’s infernal past. A past too terrifying to remember. A past Jack Stein knows he must lead her back into, for Lacie herself holds the key to the killer’s identity and motive. Her memory alone holds the answer to what she has done to deserve a living Hell on earth.

Reach out and touch the fire, Lacie. The Dead Time is here.

A novel filled with staggering twists and turns and harrowing drama, BURNOUT marks the arrival of a stunning voice in contemporary suspense fiction.