The Black: A Lane Lamore Thriller

The fire took eight hundred and fifty homes. What came after took more. When bounty hunter Lane Lamore drives into the smoking ruin of the Honeywell Valley to collect a two-bit disaster fraudster, she expects a quick fee and a quicker exit. Instead, hidden between the mattress and box spring of a con man's motel room, she finds a dead man's notebook - nine pages of names, companies, and offers, logged by a retired surveyor who spent his last days on a shelter cot documenting every predator who came through the door. The surveyor died four days later. Officially, a flare-up took him while he was rescuing his dog. His dog was thirty miles away in a kennel the whole time. What starts as a courtesy - returning a stranger's notebook to his daughter - pulls Lane into the machinery working a valley's worth of grief: fake adjusters signing widows in evacuation shelters, contractors vanishing with rebuild deposits, land buyers circling burned lots before the ash cools, and a debris removal contract quietly billing the federal government for trucks that never crossed the scale. Every thread leads back to one holding company, six shell names deep - and to Lester Peugh, the soft-spoken philanthropist funding the valley's recovery from a podium in the same gym where a dead man once wrote everything down. The fire is still burning. Lane is running out of people she can trust to stay alive long enough to talk. And the only weapon left that fire can't erase and Lester can't buy is the one thing Lane has never had to use before: silence. THE BLACK is Book 5 in the Lane Lamore thriller series - a story about what happens to a family in the weeks after a wildfire, built from real fraud schemes, real insurance gaps, and real law. Includes a nonfiction appendix, Before / During / After, with the same guidance Lane uses to survive the valley - information every homeowner in fire country should have before they need it. If you loved High and Dry, Never Enough, Sleight of Hand, or The Wrong Feet, Lane's fifth case is her most dangerous - and her most personal.