In Hollis, everyone knows the hero. The hero knows everyone.
Arson investigator Sarah Mills comes home under suspension — two deaths she can't outrun, her career in pieces, and a case she should have declined. Three houses burned. Four people dead. Captain Daniel Farrow, the county's most trusted man, is waiting in the station lot with two cups of coffee at the right temperature, and the exact knowledge of how she takes hers.
Daniel is everything a small town wants its hero to be: first through the burning door, last to take credit, warm with every child he meets. He coaches Little League. He knows which teacher assigns what books. He knows which exit door your child lines up at for fire drills.
He has always known.
Sarah knows how to read people. She's been reading Daniel for a week, and something in the reading won't resolve. The evidence is real. The pattern is there. The case is building exactly the way a careful investigator would expect — and that, she is beginning to understand, is the problem.
She has followed a clean sequence before. In Columbus, it cost a man his life.
As the fires escalate and the picture narrows, Sarah discovers that she wasn't brought to Hollis to find the truth.
She was brought here because the truth already found her — twenty years ago, in a burning building, in the dark.
"It was not the hero smile. This one was quieter, and harder to place."
A slow-burn psychological thriller about a town that protected its hero for twenty years, a hero who protected something the town never knew he was carrying, and the investigator who was chosen — long before there was a case — for reasons that will rewrite everything she thought she knew.
With a revelation that changes the meaning of every page that came before it.
Perfect for readers of Tana French, Gillian Flynn, and The Silent Patient.
Genre: Mystery
Arson investigator Sarah Mills comes home under suspension — two deaths she can't outrun, her career in pieces, and a case she should have declined. Three houses burned. Four people dead. Captain Daniel Farrow, the county's most trusted man, is waiting in the station lot with two cups of coffee at the right temperature, and the exact knowledge of how she takes hers.
Daniel is everything a small town wants its hero to be: first through the burning door, last to take credit, warm with every child he meets. He coaches Little League. He knows which teacher assigns what books. He knows which exit door your child lines up at for fire drills.
He has always known.
Sarah knows how to read people. She's been reading Daniel for a week, and something in the reading won't resolve. The evidence is real. The pattern is there. The case is building exactly the way a careful investigator would expect — and that, she is beginning to understand, is the problem.
She has followed a clean sequence before. In Columbus, it cost a man his life.
As the fires escalate and the picture narrows, Sarah discovers that she wasn't brought to Hollis to find the truth.
She was brought here because the truth already found her — twenty years ago, in a burning building, in the dark.
"It was not the hero smile. This one was quieter, and harder to place."
A slow-burn psychological thriller about a town that protected its hero for twenty years, a hero who protected something the town never knew he was carrying, and the investigator who was chosen — long before there was a case — for reasons that will rewrite everything she thought she knew.
With a revelation that changes the meaning of every page that came before it.
Perfect for readers of Tana French, Gillian Flynn, and The Silent Patient.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for T R Sloane's The Hero of Hollis