BLACKOUT

BLACKOUT

In the sweltering summer of 1977, New York City is a powder keg — crime soaring, lights flickering, and a killer moving through the streets with twenty years of patience and a wire garrote.

Detective Jack Rourke catches a case that shouldn't matter: a retired firefighter found hanged in a Bowery apartment. But the knots are wrong, the victim was afraid of water, and in his hand is a charred photograph of a burning orphanage. The trail leads back to 1957, to St. Jude's Home for Children, where eleven children and a nun died in a fire that was ruled an accident. It wasn't.

As bodies pile up — each connected to the orphanage, each staged to look like something else — Jack falls desperately in love with Elena Vasquez, a gallery curator with burn scars she keeps hidden and a warmth that makes him forget the case. What he doesn't know is that Elena's real name is Maria Salazar. She was three years old the night St. Jude's burned. She survived. And she has spent twenty years hunting everyone responsible — including Jack's own father, the cop who buried the truth.

Every character is a suspect. Every chapter ends on a knife's edge. And when the city goes dark on July 13, the final reckoning unfolds on a rooftop above the blackout — where love, guilt, and fire collide in a single gunshot.

A noir thriller about the things that burn and never stop burning.