About this book:

Leah Carmichael returns to her quiet, secretive hometown of Emberwood after a career-ending scandal, only to confront the mysterious death of her estranged father, Elias. His peculiar will mandates she live in his crumbling Victorian mansion for a year, a condition that soon reveals itself to be less about inheritance and more about a dangerous, unfinished legacy. Leah unearths her father’s meticulously kept diary, a chilling chronicle of his secret investigation into the devastating Emberwood Mill fire twenty-five years ago—a tragedy officially ruled an accident, but one Elias believed was a meticulously orchestrated cover-up connected to powerful town figures, environmental pollution, and the disappearance of a young child named Lily.

As Leah delves deeper into her father's notes and hidden caches of evidence, she discovers a sinister network of influence known as the Emberwood Lodge, led by the seemingly benevolent Mayor Edward Vance, whom her father secretly identified as "Carver"—the ruthless orchestrator of the town's darkest secrets and Elias’s ultimate demise. Hunted by Vance’s enforcers, who steal the diary and attempt to silence her, Leah teams up with her estranged childhood friend, Sarah Miller, and the conflicted Sheriff Ben Carter to uncover a shocking truth that implicates Emberwood’s most respected citizens in murder, environmental crimes, and the heartbreaking fate of Lily Vance. From hidden passages beneath the Victorian to the treacherous depths of abandoned mine shafts, Leah races against time to expose the truth before she becomes Emberwood’s next silenced echo.