Rust on the Chrome

The sodium lights at Caldwell Motorplex flicker on at 4:47 a.m., three minutes before the timer should kill the overnight circuit. Maren Holloway sees it from the access road and follows the signal straight into a clandestine street meet run by a man named Daltrey Reeves, a race her brother Jase, her nephew Buck, and the rest of the Caldwell crew never intended for her to witness. Maren is a mechanic, not a driver, but she has spent her whole life reading engines the way other people read faces, and what she sees under those buzzing lights tells her the cars have been modified beyond anything legal. Worse, the racers themselves, Jase, Buck, Rico Vela, a wildcard called Donut Rat, and an old hand named Wendell Pritchard, look like men who have already sold something they can't buy back. By the time the sun comes up, the track is empty, the evidence is gone, and a county deputy named Hollis Pratt is asking questions that could bury the whole family. Elsie Caldwell, the matriarch, demands answers no one wants to give. Tasha Greer, the local whose diner sees every transaction the strip doesn't, knows more than she's said in years. Maren has one choice: turn over what she knows to the people who can protect her family, or keep her mouth shut and let Jase and Buck finish the race that could destroy them all. The checkered flag falls at dawn, and somebody has to drag the wreckage off the asphalt.