The Last Alarm: The Jack Mercer Files
A fire from the past was never truly extinguished. Now someone will kill to keep it buried.
Twenty-eight years ago, Captain Pete Donnelly responded to a devastating fire on Mississippi Avenue in St. Louis's historic Lafayette Square. Four people died, and investigators eventually blamed the tragedy on an electrical failure.
The case was closed.
But Pete Donnelly never forgot that night.
Now retired, Pete discovers a collection of old firehouse records and photographs-images that force him to question what investigators believed happened nearly three decades earlier. Something about the fire doesn't fit. And Pete begins digging.
Then his own house burns.
St. Louis Fire Department investigator Jack Mercer arrives to find what appears to be a tragic but ordinary accident: food left cooking on a stove, a kitchen fire, and seventy-two-year-old Pete Donnelly dead in an upstairs bedroom.
There's only one problem.
Pete was a veteran firefighter who understood fire better than almost anyone Jack had ever known. His smoke alarm was working. The fire remained largely downstairs. Yet Pete never tried to escape.
Jack refuses to call it anything more than an undetermined fire until the evidence proves otherwise. But questions begin multiplying.
A box of old fire records is missing.
Pete's laptop is gone.
So is his phone.
And someone appears to have carefully searched his house.
When toxicology finally provides an explanation for why Pete never woke up, the investigation changes completely. What looked like an accidental fire becomes something far more sinister-and Jack realizes Pete may have died because he discovered the truth about four deaths everyone stopped questioning twenty-eight years ago.
Working alongside fire investigator Tyler Reed, Sergeant Sarah Delgado, and Detective Isaiah Brooks, Jack must reconstruct two fires separated by nearly three decades. Every photograph, burn pattern, medical record, and forgotten witness could expose what really happened on Mississippi Avenue.
But someone else is watching the investigation.
Someone who has already kept a secret buried for twenty-eight years.
And if another fire is what it takes to keep that secret hidden, Pete Donnelly won't be the last alarm.
The Last Alarm, Book 7 of The Jack Mercer Files, is a gripping fire-investigation mystery about old evidence, deadly secrets, and one investigator's determination to follow the evidence wherever it burns.
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