Mike V. Piana
**Ash on Our Skin** A Pinehaven NovelTen years ago, two teenage girls walked into the Colorado mountains and never came home. Pinehaven buried the case, the town, and the truth in the same shallow grave.Detective Gabriela Rodrigues thought she was escaping her own ghosts when she moved to the postcard-perfect town of Pinehaven. Instead, she married one.When an old cabin burns to the ground in the dead of night, a single silver charm found in the ashes rips the past wide open. The deeper Gabi digs, the uglier the secrets get: a circle of Pinehaven’s most respected citizens (sheriff, councilman, school counselor, social-services director) running a decades-long trafficking ring hidden behind bake sales and Friday-night football. Every powerful family in town is stained. And every clue points straight to Gabi’s husband, Ethan.As the fires spread from remote cabins to her own home, Gabi is forced to confront the terrifying possibility that the man sleeping beside her stood by while children were sold and buried. Deputy Lauren Pike (daughter of the circle’s architect) becomes Gabi’s only ally, and the electric tension between them ignites into something neither can deny, even as the town tries to burn them both alive.With a twelve-minute countdown ticking while gasoline circles her husband in their burning basement, Gabi must decide: protect the man she vowed to love, or torch forty years of inherited evil and finally give the missing girls the justice they were denied.Dark, propulsive, and unflinching, ’Ash on Our Skin’ is a thriller about corruption that runs generations deep, the price of looking away, and two women who choose to drag an entire town into the light (no matter how many bridges they have to burn behind them).Crime | Mystery & Detective | LGBTQ+ Thriller | Small-Town Corruption For fans of Julia Heaberlin, Lisa Unger, and Mare of Easttown
