The Burning Season

By Ben Oloche

Three fires in three weeks in the Woodlawn neighbourhood of Chicago's South Side. Three buildings recently acquired by a private development company. Three rulings of accidental by the same fire investigator. And then a fourth fire kills Grace Mu oz, seventy-four years old, who had lived in her building on Cottage Grove for thirty-one years and had refused to sell it in writing, on three separate occasions to the company that wanted her land.
The medical examiner rules homicide. The fire investigator ruled it accidental. Detective Maya Cross has two competing reports on her desk and a dead woman who should not be dead.
The investigation leads quickly to the mechanism: Leon Prieto, eighteen-year veteran of the fire department's Bureau of Fire Investigation, has been receiving payments through a shell entity from a subsidiary connected to developer Dennis Hale. Hale has spent a year assembling land in Woodlawn's Tax Increment Financing district, where a ninety-four-million-dollar development project is waiting for a full city block. Grace Mu oz's building was the last piece. Prieto was paid to make the fires look accidental. A pharmacy technician formerly employed by Hale was administering sedatives to residents before the fires were set ensuring they could not escape.
The political cover runs through Alderman Thomas Carey, who chairs the TIF oversight committee for a ward that isn't his and has been directing public funding toward Hale's projects through a financial relationship that the city's ethics board has found, twice, to be within legal limits. Alderman Reginald Osei has been raising the alarm for two years. No one has listened.
When surveillance reveals a fifth fire being prepared this time in Hyde Park, this time with both residential units targeted Maya moves the arrest timeline up. Four simultaneous arrests: the fire investigator, the pharmacy technician, the developer, and the alderman. On the same afternoon. Before anyone can manage the story.
The scope, when Cantu's mapping is complete, covers three Chicago neighborhoods. Woodlawn, Pilsen, and Humboldt Park. The same methodology in three places simultaneously. The same cleared-land calculation applied to the same vulnerable communities with the same patient, methodical disregard for the people living there.

The fourth Maya Cross novel is the angriest and the most immediate a book about what happens at the end of the mechanism, when the abstract corruption of public financing systems meets the specific reality of a seventy-four-year-old woman who said no and meant it. Set across the South Side of Chicago in December, The Burning Season is a book about land and money and the people who live between them, and about a detective who drives home at the end to discover that the methodology she has just prosecuted was being applied to her own neighbourhood.
Urgent, precise, and genuinely enraged, The Burning Season is essentially Maya Cross.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYJ2WLKQ
• ISBN13: 9798258743985
• Release Date: April 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 106 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"