Serial Burn by Lynette Eason ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

She's out for justice. But the arsonist she's tracking is out for retribution.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site. A free book was provided for an honest review.

January 2025; Revell; 978-0800741211
audio, ebook, print (320 pages); Christian suspense

This book is a suspense story that kept me turning pages.  It's also a slow-burn clean romance with two characters who were still dealing with trauma from their pasts and had to try to get beyond their past hurts to look forward to the future. 

Jesslyn is the fire marshal in Lake City.  She became a fire marshal because her entire family had died in a fire 20 years earlier that had been arson.  The main goal in her life is to solve the mystery of who started the fire and bring them to justice.  She has a lot of friends but she doesn't want to get involved in a romance because she is afraid that it might interfere with her goal to solve her family's deaths.  As the story begins, she is called to a fire at her home church.  It's now been twenty years since the fire that changed her life and a string of fires all tied to her life make her wonder if there is a connection.  As the clues pile up, so does the danger to her. Because a church fire is considered a hate crime, the FBI sends a team to investigate.  Nathan, who also had trauma in his past due to fire, works closely with Jesslyn to investigate the fires.  The more they work together, the more the sparks fly between them but neither one of them is interested in a romance.  Can they learn to let go of their past trauma and try to find a happy future ahead? 

I thought that the two main characters were very well written.  They both had trauma in their past due to fire.  Nathan wanted to bury that part of his past while Jesslyn spent her life trying to solve the fire in her past.  Despite her aunt telling her that it was time to live her life, she can't let go of her goal to solve the crime and bring the arsonist to justice.  The novel got very intense in the last 100 pages and there was no way that I could put the book down until the last page.  I think it's time to read the first two books in the series while I wait for the 4th book.  This was definitely a great read.

Note:  This is the third book in the 4 book series Lake City Heroes.  It can be read as standalone but there are a lot of people in this book who were part of books 1 and 2.  I think I would have preferred to read the series in order to better understand the relationship between the characters.

Buy Serial Burn at Amazon 

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction.   

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