The Burn Line (Paperback)

Before the town had secrets, it had systems.

Berlin, New Hampshire, 1974. The mills are still running. The stacks still breathe over the valley. The Androscoggin River still carries the weight of everything built along its banks.

Twenty-two-year-old Julie Moreau knows the city by its working parts: the whistle, the shift changes, the bakery windows glowing against dirty snow, the motel rooms that never stay clean for long, the back stairs, side doors, and alleys women learn to notice before anyone teaches them why.

Julie cleans offices, boardinghouse rooms, and the places respectable men leave dirty. She keeps a blue notebook because paper is safer than speaking, and because in a town built on ledgers, routes, debts, and silence, writing something down may be the only way to survive it.

Then women begin vanishing into explanations.

• A bus ticket south.
• A locked room at the North Star Motel.
• A missing office key.
• A yellow ribbon near the lower river.
• A girl in a green coat who knows too much and can barely speak at all.

At first, each clue looks small enough to dismiss. In Berlin, people have work in the morning. Families have reputations to protect. Men with money have friends in the right offices. The river has always taken things, and winter has always made accidents easy to believe.

But Julie is watching.

Her search pulls her through Main Street bakeries, church basements, boardinghouse kitchens, mill offices, bus station counters, motel ledgers, winter roads, and the old boom piers along the Androscoggin River — remnants of the river’s logging past, when timber was moved by routes older than the crimes later built on top of them.

Before the Burn Line moved women, it moved wood.

Before it became evidence, it was infrastructure.

And before anyone called it evil, it was useful.

As Julie follows the trail, she uncovers something larger and colder than one disappearance: a hidden system built from money, favors, debt, access, and official records men thought they controlled. Every locked room has a reason. Every missing page has a history. Every road points somewhere, even the ones no one admits exist.

But Berlin has another map.

North Country women keep keys in flour tins. Warnings in recipe boxes. Proof in coat linings, library cards, and rooms men were never meant to enter. They pass names through kitchens, mark danger with color, and remember what the official story leaves out.

Julie is not a detective. She is a cleaner, a daughter, a witness, and a young woman learning too late that being underestimated can be dangerous in both directions.

Because the closer she gets to the truth, the more the city tightens around her.

A police officer with a careful voice. A motel desk clerk who knows more than she says. A priest who realizes too late how easily concern can be turned into a leash. A powerful family with old debts to hide. A river man who knows the winter banks better than any map. And Victor Arsenault, a young man learning that a story does not have to be true to become the record.

On a January night when firelight hits the ice and the Androscoggin begins keeping its own account, Julie must decide what can be saved, what must be hidden, and what must be changed before the men chasing her understand what she has moved beyond their reach.

No witnesses means us.

The Burn Line is a standalone historical crime thriller that serves as the prequel to the world of Androscoggin After Dark: a dark, atmospheric North Country collection of mill-town secrets, missing women, corrupted records, river history, and one young woman who refuses to let the official version be the only story that survives.