The blizzard stopped. The fire started. Nobody can explain why.
The blizzard should have killed the fire risk. Instead, it masked it. When the snow stops and smoke rises from Devil's Bowl, Cal Walker pushes past Sheriff Buckley's demand for "protocols" and heads into the canyon. Two teenagers are missing. The smoke is getting thicker.
What Cal finds is worse than a search. The fire is real, spreading fast, and the Black River — every SAR team's fallback fire break — is a drought-reduced trickle that wouldn't protect a dog. Every escape route is closing. And somewhere in the smoke, a phantom baby cry draws Cal back toward the flames.
Then the wind shifts. The fire changes direction. It's heading for Echo Creek. At the town hall, a teenager's asthma attack nearly kills her. Cal injects an EpiPen borrowed from a stranger. He looks out the window and sees the glow on the horizon. The town is next.
In the burned aftermath, Cal walks the fire's origin point and finds something that doesn't belong: metallic fragments, smooth and glassy, denser than any rock on Black Mountain. The fire didn't start on the ground. It fell from the sky.
NIGHT DROP is the eleventh book in the Black Mountain Series '' where the threat stops being terrestrial.
Genre: Mystery
The blizzard should have killed the fire risk. Instead, it masked it. When the snow stops and smoke rises from Devil's Bowl, Cal Walker pushes past Sheriff Buckley's demand for "protocols" and heads into the canyon. Two teenagers are missing. The smoke is getting thicker.
What Cal finds is worse than a search. The fire is real, spreading fast, and the Black River — every SAR team's fallback fire break — is a drought-reduced trickle that wouldn't protect a dog. Every escape route is closing. And somewhere in the smoke, a phantom baby cry draws Cal back toward the flames.
Then the wind shifts. The fire changes direction. It's heading for Echo Creek. At the town hall, a teenager's asthma attack nearly kills her. Cal injects an EpiPen borrowed from a stranger. He looks out the window and sees the glow on the horizon. The town is next.
In the burned aftermath, Cal walks the fire's origin point and finds something that doesn't belong: metallic fragments, smooth and glassy, denser than any rock on Black Mountain. The fire didn't start on the ground. It fell from the sky.
NIGHT DROP is the eleventh book in the Black Mountain Series '' where the threat stops being terrestrial.
Genre: Mystery