White Hot

When she hears that her younger brother Danny has committed suicide, Sayre Lynch relents from her vow never to return to Destiny, the small Louisiana town in which she grew up. She plans to leave immediately after the funeral, but instead soon finds herself drawn into the web cast by Huff Hoyle, her controlling and tyrannical father, the man who owns the town’s sole industry, an iron foundry, and in effect runs the lives of everyone who lives there.
As she feared, Sayre learns that nothing has changed. Her father and older brother, Chris, are as devious as ever, and now they have a new partner-in-crime, a canny and disarming lawyer named Beck Merchant, who appears to be their equal in corruption.
Soon, Sayre is thrown in closer contact with Beck and becomes convinced that something more sinister is at play than her father’s usual need to dominate people and events. As she sets out to learn just what did happen to Danny, she comes to realize that there are many secrets in Destiny—secrets that hide decades of pain and anger, and that threaten at any moment to erupt and destroy not only her father and brother, but perhaps Sayre herself.
Underneath the rigid control that the Hoyles exert over the town, trouble is brewing. Old hatreds foster plans for revenge, past crimes resurface, and a maverick deputy sheriff determines that Danny Hoyle’s death was not suicide, but murder.
As tensions mount, threatening to ignite a powder keg of long-held hostility, Sayre finds herself inextricably drawn into a struggle with striking laborers, her unscrupulous father, and her own emotions over the love/hate relationship that is growing with Beck, a man apparently with his own agenda, and mysteries of his own.
As she has shown in the dozens of bestselling novels in which she has combined hard-edged suspense with intense emotion, Sandra Brown is a master storyteller, and in her new novel she is at her very best.
"Some said that if he was going to kill himself, he couldn’t have picked a better day for it. Life was hardly worth living that particular Sunday afternoon, and most organisms were doing a half-assed job of it. The atmosphere was as thick and hot as breakfast grits. It sucked the energy right out of every living thing, be it plant or animal. Clouds evaporated under the ferocity of the sun. Moving from indoors to out was like stepping into a blast furnace like those in the Hoyles’ foundry. At the family’s fishing camp on Bayou Bosquet—so named because of the island of cypress trees in the middle of the creek’s slow-moving current a stuffed, six-foot gator basked in the heat of the yard. His glass eyes reflected the glare of the hot sky. The Louisiana state flag hung furled and limp upon its pole. Cicadas were too indolent to make their grating music, although one industrious insect occasionally disturbed the somnolent atmosphere with an attempt that was halfhearted at best. Fish remained well below the surface of the water and its opaque green blanket of duckweed. They kept to the shadowy, murky depths, their only sign of life being the periodic pulsing of gills. A water moccasin lay inert on the bank, menacing but motionless."