Kindling Point

A fire investigator crouches in a burned bedroom and finds what she expected to find: faulty wiring, accidental cause, open-and-shut.

Then she turns over the photograph on the nightstand.

The victim is Faye Selwood — the woman Sienna Cray helped send to prison for arson twelve years ago. The same aluminium wiring that killed Faye this week was present in the flat Sienna called a crime scene in 2012. Sienna noted it then. And dismissed it.

Inside a wardrobe that survived the blaze, Faye's boxes wait: twelve years of complaint letters, electrical inspection reports, witness statements, and a draft appeal to the Criminal Cases Review Commission that stops mid-sentence. Faye spent nine years in prison building the case for her own innocence. She had one week left.

Now Sienna's supervisor wants the file closed by Thursday, and her own words from the witness box sit in the archive like a verdict passed on herself. An old neighbor remembers complaints nobody investigated. A landlord's statement has a familiar name at the bottom. And somewhere in the unit's basement, in the incoming post for March 2012, there may be a letter that was received and never disclosed.

Kindling Point is a novel about the weight of certainty — how institutions protect themselves, how good people make catastrophic errors, and what it costs to say so. It asks what justice means when the person who was wronged is already gone, and whether correcting the record is an act of courage or simply the minimum that decency requires.

For readers who believe in accountability without easy absolution. For anyone who has ever been completely certain about something they later had to take apart piece by piece.

The record cannot give Faye Selwood back nine years. It can stop calling her an arsonist. Kindling Point — because some truths only ignite after the damage is done.