Valley of Ashes
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2.8 • 13 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
Madeline Dare trades New York's gritty streets for the tree-lined avenues of Boulder, Colorado when her husband Dean lands a promising job. Madeline, now a full-time homemaker and mother to beautiful toddler twin girls, has achieved everything she thought she always wanted, but with her husband constantly on the road, she's fighting a losing battle against the Betty Friedan riptide of suburban/maternal exhaustion, angst, and sheer loneliness. A new freelance newspaper gig helps her get her mojo back, but Boulder isn't nearly as tranquil as it seems: there's a serial arsonist at large in the city. As Madeline closes in on the culprit, the fires turn deadly-and the stakes tragically personal. She'll need every ounce of strength and courage she has to keep the flames from reaching her own doorstep, threatening all she holds most dear.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Fire both literal and figurative threatens to consume everything in Madeline Dare's life in Read's wrenching fourth suspense novel featuring the former debutante (after 2010's Invisible Boy). Madeline is eager to return to writing, having relocated in 1995 to Boulder, Colo., for husband Dean's new job. With Dean at work or away on business more often than he's home, it's hard to do more than wrangle their one-year-old twin daughters, Parrish and India, and keep her sanity, but Madeline still jumps at the chance to write restaurant reviews for the local paper. Meanwhile, crime-magnet Madeline can't help overhearing her editor talking about Boulder's string of increasingly brazen arson attacks, and soon she's shadowing arson investigator Mimi Neff, a former New Yorker, unbeknownst to Dean. The tensions rise as Madeline's marriage begins to buckle. There's an inevitable sense of doom throughout, which Read doles out in perfectly proportioned doses.
