Fire Season

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She came to stop the fire. He builds things to burn. Harper Quinlan is a fire-safety engineer from Pittsburgh. She doesn't go near bonfires, and she hasn't watched a firework since the winter her father went into a burning warehouse and didn't come out. So of course her firm sends her to a small town on the Valencian coast for the Fallas: nineteen days of firecrackers at eight in the morning, a thunderous two o'clock show every afternoon, and a final night when the whole town burns the giant monuments it has spent a year building. Her job is to certify the biggest one: El Fènix, a twenty-three-meter phoenix fourteen meters from the town hall balcony. On her first morning she tells its artist it's too tall. Nacho Ferrús builds fallas the way his grandfather did, by eye, with a secret cut in the mast that nobody outside the family has ever seen. He has thirteen days to finish his bird, a treasurer who keeps delaying the last payment, and no time for an American with a decibel meter. Then somebody sets fire to his yard. And the insurance on the phoenix turns out to be worth a great deal more if it burns early. Fire Season is an enemies-to-lovers romance with a real mystery. It has a paella contest and a slice of chorizo that scandalizes a whole town, a grandmother who has judged the rice for forty years, a bell tower of two hundred and eleven steps, and the loudest two o'clock in Europe. For readers who want: • Opposites who have to learn each other's trade • A mystery solved with a stopwatch, a wiring plan and a match flag • Spain in festival season: orange blossom, gunpowder, silk and fire • A heroine who learns to let go without losing herself • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A past death in a fire, off the page; a tense bomb-disposal scene.