Dark, Southern gothic tale of homicide detective Raven Burns, with a complicated past and a desperate case to solve. Black Girls Lit recommends the first book, A Killing Fire "to crime fiction and mystery lovers and fans of Ruth Ware and Gillian Flynn.”

“Full-bodied and dynamic characters carry this one along a mystery, tying a brutal past with a bloody present that will keep you guessing right up to the finale.” — Unnerving Magazine on Book 1 in the series.

Raven Burns owes her life to the kind souls who looked after her while her father, unbeknownst to them, sowed a path of blood and bodies from California to Louisiana as one of the most notorious serial killers ever known, Floyd “Fire” Burns. When Raven was a girl, Floyd brutally murdered one of those kind souls, Miss Ruth Jefferson, when the woman made the fatal decision to open the door to him on a pitch-black 4th of July night. As Raven learned of her father’s crimes, she vowed to do everything in her power to put men like him away. Decades later Raven’s hunt for a serial killer terrorizing the town leads her right back to that 4th of July night, and a memory that will make her question how much Floyd’s evil has settled in her bones.

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Detective Rory Scott was in college when six-year-old Savannah Armitage vanished and the body of a missing teen was found nearby in a shallow grave. The case went unsolved, but Rory’s mother's partner, Stephen, was convicted in the court of public opinion. When Rory’s mother refused to leave him, Rory broke familial ties.

Six years later, Rory has built a life with her girlfriend Cade. When another child disappears and the unidentified body of a missing teen is found nearby, Rory knows it’s more than a coincidence. She steps in as the lead investigator, determined to find the killer and bring home the missing girls. As media swarms law enforcement for details, the state steps in, and a rookie special agent yanks Rory’s case.

In a renegade move, Rory teams up with Savannah’s mother, a woman still desperate to find her daughter alive. When the investigation leads to the two people Rory most wants to avoid—her own mother and Stephen—Rory must face the fallout of her estrangement.

As Rory’s personal and professional lives converge, it’s a race against time to find the connection between the cases and bring the killer to justice.

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NONE WITNESS

Book One of the Killian Kane Series

When the Church cannot forgive, it resolves.

Killian Kane was never meant to survive his childhood.

The son of a Chicago Outfit enforcer, he was raised inside a world where violence was currency and silence was survival. By seventeen, he was already cleaning what powerful men left behind. Then he vanished—erased from the criminal underworld by a secretive, Vatican-adjacent authority known only as the Resolution Office.

They did not save him.

They remade him.

Now Killian serves as a Custodian, an operative tasked with containing the unforgivable. He does not kill. He erases evidence. He constructs plausible truths. He ensures the world never learns what the Church itself cannot survive revealing.

For years, Resolution has kept its secrets buried.

Until a priest in New York commits a brutal, ritualized murder.

Killian is dispatched to contain the scandal. But what he finds is not a crime of passion. It is a message.

Soon, similar killings emerge across Chicago, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis. Each murder is more public. More symbolic. More deliberate. The killer is not hiding.

He is escalating.

The man responsible is Lucien, a brilliant and charismatic priest who believes murder is not sin, but sacrament. He targets clergy the Church quietly protected—men whose crimes were buried through settlement, silence, and reassignment. Lucien believes he is delivering divine justice.

And he knows things he should not know.

He knows about Resolution.

He knows about its methods.

He knows about Killian.

As Killian closes in, the Resolution Office assigns him an Instrument—an assassin authorized to perform Terminal Resolution. Forced into partnership with sanctioned violence, Killian begins to uncover a truth more terrifying than Lucien’s crusade:

Resolution did not just recruit him.

It engineered him.

Now hunted by the system that created him and pursued by a killer who believes himself chosen, Killian must confront the possibility that he was never meant to serve justice.

Only to contain it.

Because when Resolution fails, there are none left to witness.

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