SPARKS AND SCHEMES: A Backdrafts & Biscuits Mystery
About SPARKS AND SCHEMES: A Backdrafts & Biscuits Mystery
When Fire Investigator Nora Hastings arrives at the third suspicious small fire in two weeks in Cedar Hollow, her instincts tell her someone is practicing. The burned dumpster, the scorched garden shed, the torched storage unit—each fire is small, contained, and almost experimental. But when the fourth blaze engulfs real estate developer Vincent Shaw's office and leaves him dead inside, Nora knows these weren't random acts of vandalism.
With help from her retired Border Collie Radar, whose sharp instincts never really retired after years of search and rescue work, she sees what the local police and state fire marshal missed—someone has been perfecting their technique for three weeks, and Vincent Shaw was always the intended target. Against pressure from the mayor to wrap things up quickly and Fire Marshal Henderson's determination to call it an accident, Nora can't ignore what the evidence reveals. Vincent wasn't popular in Cedar Hollow—his aggressive development plans threatened to destroy the town's historic downtown, his business practices left former partners financially ruined, and his personal life was littered with enemies.
Between the Historical Society president who'd been fighting his demolition plans for months, the business partner he'd been embezzling from, and the contractor whose life he'd destroyed, there's no shortage of suspects with both motive and opportunity. With help from her uncle Frank, the retired fire chief who taught her everything about reading burn patterns, Nora traces the progression of test fires through Cedar Hollow's community, where a methodical killer spent weeks rehearsing the perfect murder. But the closer Nora gets to connecting the dots, the more dangerous her investigation becomes.
Someone spray-paints a threat on her garage, warning her to stop digging or get burned. Evidence from the scenes mysteriously points in multiple directions, and Radar keeps alerting to details that suggest this carefully orchestrated plan involved more than one person. In a town where everyone knows everyone's business and the line between preservation and destruction is razor-thin, Nora must risk everything to prove that Vincent's death was no accident and expose a killer who's spent weeks planning the perfect crime.