Burn Season

Dr. Vera Gallo has spent two decades hunting arsonists for the U.S. Forest Service, stopping fires before they destroy. But when she's assigned a cold case—a series of deliberately set blazes in the Oregon Cascades spanning three decades—she discovers something impossible: every fire was set to heal, not harm. Each one burned in a pattern that strengthened the forest, triggered seed germination, cleared disease. Someone has been conducting a secret ecological experiment for thirty years, using fire as a tool for restoration.

As Vera traces the fires forward through time, interviewing aging rangers and residents who lived through the burns, she becomes obsessed with understanding her quarry's logic. The investigation pulls her deep into the science of fire ecology—knowledge that was fringe thirty years ago but has now become mainstream. She realizes the person she's hunting was decades ahead of the field, operating on an understanding of forest systems that most scientists are only now beginning to grasp.

But obsession has a cost. Vera's investigation attracts attention from logging interests, government agencies, and others who benefit from keeping the forest's secrets buried. As she closes in on the identity of the fire-setter, she must confront an impossible choice: arrest the person who may have saved an entire ecosystem, or become complicit in the cover-up herself. Burn Season is a thriller about the price of conviction, the ambiguity of harm and healing, and whether the most necessary crimes are the ones we never prosecute.