The Ash Beneath the Snow
A body surfaces beneath a frozen river the morning a journalist with a buried past comes home. Maren Halloway, investigative reporter for a city paper, returns to the rural town she fled years ago expecting nothing more than closure, and finds yellow tape snapping in the wind and a corpse no one can name. The deputies on scene are too quiet, the sheriff too eager to call it an accident, and someone is already scrubbing the evidence before she can photograph it. When an anonymous informant begins feeding her details about a decades-old cover-up tied to the powerful Thorne family, Maren realizes the case is tangled with her own estranged sister, Delia Halloway-Thorne, now married into the dynasty at the center of the rot. As she pursues the story with the reluctant help of local fixer Ira Sandoval, she draws the attention of Dr. Jonas Veil, whose clinic records may hold the key, and of parties willing to torch everything to stay hidden. Each clue Maren uncovers peels back another layer of small-town myth, exposing affairs, cold deaths, and a conspiracy that reaches back to the night her mother stopped speaking. To publish the truth is to betray her sister and torch her career on a story no one will print. To walk away is to let the next body fall. The ash beneath the snow is finally warm again, and the fire is hers to start or smother.