Ten Strangers...
Fourteen Days...
One Inescapable Destiny...
Dark, compelling, and erotic, BURN tells the story of ten men and women, each with a twisted and secret passion, whose lives collide with devastating intensity. Beginning with a fiery public disaster in present-day Tucson, Arizona (see map), the seemingly disconnected steps of these ten are jarringly retraced and connected over the two-week period leading up to the catastrophe. What starts as a series of apparently innocent events quickly transforms into the tragic workings of the characters' shared destiny. While initially strangers, their lives are pushed together by their decisions--decisions based on desire, insanity, fatalismo , addiction and obsession--until the novel reaches its explosive and purifying conclusion. Get on board for a harrowing sleigh ride through hell that starts on the very first page.
These ten protagonists battle sexual passions, destructive addictions, and dark obsessions that determine their fate:
- a fallen therapist beginning an affair with a patient
- a rogue detective obsessively stalking a suspect
- a wounded probation officer fighting suicide after his family's murder
- a conflicted social worker suspecting her detective husband
- a macho alcoholic roofer wrestling against his buried sexuality
- a beautiful tortured psychotic stalking his ex-lover
- a stunning university student addicted to Robitussin
- a haunted mother of autistic twins who warn her about their father
- a doctoral student fearfully fulfilling a dead bed request
- a dead professor casting messages from beyond the grave
The characters race breakneck towards the novel's explosive climax. Find out who lives and who dies in BURN'S riveting final confrontation.
Prologue
Rookie Officer Paul Altamirano, badge #3714 of the Tucson Police Department, was the first to arrive on the scene that night. City budget cuts had mandated the previously standard two-officer squad cars be replaced by single units. Altamirano preferred a partner, but he was fine with patrolling alone. That was until now. Shots fired in or near the La Mirada Behavioral Health Clinic on the southwest corner of Speedway and Grande. Upon arriving, he stoically called in his location on the radio, more to steel his nerves than to sound professional. The Tucson thermometer that night hovered at eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit, an unnaturally high temperature for the middle of February, even for this desert habitation. The weather had been so bizarre lately: the heat.
Altamirano slowly, cautiously, eased his portly frame out of the squad car. His mind spun as he saw what lay before him. He was careful to keep his hysterical female passenger locked in the back seat behind the cage of the squad car. He had originally thought the young blond woman's frantic babbling hysteria crazy; now he wasn't so sure.
The first thing he noticed upon arriving on the scene was the rear end of a vehicle that had been plowed through what had once been the double glass doors of the clinic's main entrance. He then saw that the windows of the clinic had been shot out. No movement inside, no sound. He fought the temptation to call out, not knowing what waited inside. The heavy, shiny gold band on his ring finger itched against his skin. Dreadful silence filled the empty night air. The plastic electric billboard of La Mirada with its logo--a circle of happy people holding hands surrounding the Hippocratic oath--grinned and beamed silently into the night. Its bright fluorescent light mutely illuminated the black asphalt parking lot. With halting steps, he approached the front entrance. By now he could identify the car as a BMW by the emblem on its trunk.
With eyes stretched wide open and his gun drawn, he cautiously squeezed through the small opening between the car and the twisted door jamb that once held the plate glass double doors of the clinic's main entrance, now slivers on the asphalt.
Inside, gingerly stepping on shattered glass fragments that covered the entire floor, he was aware that he was trembling. His eyes slowly readjusted to the inner darkness; the only light came from the lobby's white and red emergency exit signs. He felt a kind of acidic nausea forming in his throat and clutching at the pit of his stomach. Though he was not aware of it, his body had the shocky tingling sensation of blood pressure suddenly dropping.
His heart froze. He tried to take it all in: the wrecked BMW crashed through the clinic's large glass doors, all windows gone, shot out, bullet holes pocking the walls, bodies fallen where they had been hit. Blood and glass everywhere. He radioed the dispatcher for help, trying to unscramble disparate details from his growing panic. He stopped when he realized he was making no sense.
"Baker-one-seven, you did not copy. Repeat, please," the radio crackled in the hollow shell of the darkened clinic.
Altamirano, sweating, wrestled with words, one white-knuckled hand holding the radio just inches from his trembling lips, the other clutching his gun, forcing it not to shake. Looking around the ruined lobby, his voice was barely a hoarse rasping whisper.
"Th-they're dead ... all dead." His trembling now was almost out of control. How many were there? His brain was too fragmented for him to count. He felt dizzy, spinning.
Can't black out--have to stay present ... stay in control.
"Other units are en route. ETA about two minutes. Twenty-one oh-eight," the dispatcher responded, marking the time.
The pulsing emergency radio tone had been initiated by the dispatcher over the police frequency to alert the other units to not make any calls that were not directly related to the call in order to keep the airwaves clear. The beeping monotonous tone echoed emptily into silence. The radio hung impotently at Paul's side; the wedding ring, glinting, nervously tapped against the black box.
Slowly, Altamirano turned around, having no idea what to do first. His neck throbbed. Seconds crawled. Where was his backup? Each step crunched on shattered glass fragments. There was silence, except for the occasional crackling of the police radio and the alert tone.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly at first, he became aware of a different and increasingly strong sense of dread, distinct from the visible horror in front of him. His confusion increased--what was that? The hair on the back of his neck bristled. He felt a sudden chill in his groin. All at once, the night air suddenly filled with the sound of distant approaching sirens. He breathed his relief in deeply.
Officer Paul Altamirano was dead before the flash burned onto the neurons behind his eyelids.
