Spanning twenty-five years, A MOTH TO FLAME tells the story of two sisters, Lydia and Jessica Barrett, who is found, dead, at the bottom of a ravine in 1991 after attending a protest in a support of a recently fired, popular teacher.
Twenty-five years later, Lydia, who suffers from nyctophobia (a fear of the night), is a coroner's investigator on the graveyard shift in Los Angeles. A promotion awaits. Her mentor Maureen Gearon is grooming Lydia to take over as county medical examiner.
If
Lydia can conquer her fear of the dark. Early one morning Lydia encounters a woman, whose neck has been broken like her sister's. Checking a missed voicemail, Lydia hears a message from the dead woman who claims to have information about Jess.
While researching her sister's accident, Lydia stumbles upon a true-crime YouTube channel,
Night Shade
, hosted by a former classmate, Shane Ellet, who maintains Jess' death wasn't an accident; it was murder. Caught in a web of lies and deception are Cam Rawls, Jess' ex-boyfriend and current hometown sheriff; Brad Pearce, the handsome, young English teacher who was sexually involved with students; and a recovering addict, Mark Burns, employed by Richard Fontaine, Mom Gloria's new boyfriend and general contractor. As Lydia grows closer to the truth, the Sand Wildfire breaks out, encroaching, and threatening to burn everything to the ground. Will Lydia learn the truth in time?
In the modern vein of authors such as Thomas Harris, Jeffrey Deaver, Paula Hawkins, and Tana French, A MOTH TO FLAME tells the story of a woman in a man's world, set against the illusion of perfect suburban lives that are anything but, populated with the scariest monsters of all: the ones right in front of our faces that we cannot see through the dark.