Southern Exposure: A Nicki Jo Burkhart Novel

By Bobby Ray

She can read a room better than anyone at MI6. She just never knew she'd have to.

Nicki Jo Burkhart runs a catfish diner off a gravel road in Watts, Oklahoma - one dead fryer away from losing the only thing that was ever truly hers. Then a gray-eyed man in a good suit drives up from London to tell her that her late uncle Roy was never a traveling salesman.

He was a spy.

And the strange recipe cards he left behind aren't recipes at all. They're the keys to a hidden network of "plain people" tucked into kitchens all over the world - a web only one person alive can read.

Her.

Now a killer called the Wren wants those keys, and the only man offering to help - a buttoned-up MI6 officer named Sebastian Vane - is exactly the kind of trouble Nicki's mama warned her about. Armed with nothing but a blond ponytail, a bottomless drawl, and a lifetime of being underestimated, Nicki walks into the coldest, most dangerous rooms in London to find out who murdered her uncle... and discovers the deadliest weapon in the building might just be a fry cook nobody ever bothered to watch.

Southern Exposure is the first novel in the Nicki Jo Burkhart series - a spy-thriller with banter on top and real stakes underneath, for readers who like their heroines sharp, their romance slow-burning, and their villains never once seeing them coming.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H7L1K859
• ISBN13: 9798185456170
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 140 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"