Emmett Doyle spent twenty years trying to forget what he did.He was a fire investigator once. A good one. The kind who could walk into a burned out shell and tell you where it started, how it started, and whether the man standing next to you was the one who lit the match. He had a red-headed wife, a badge, a house on Wexler Street with a blue door and a maple tree out front. He had a life. Then he burned a house down.Nobody ever proved it. Nobody ever charged him. But the man who owned that house knew, and the woman who slept next to him knew, and Emmett knew most of all. He lost the badge. He lost the marriage. He kept the guilt, which was the only thing nobody could take from him.Now he is fifty two years old and living alone in a house with too many rooms. He eats sandwiches standing over the sink. He sleeps in a chair with his shoes on. The phone does not ring much anymore.Then the fires start.Small ones at first. A dumpster behind a laundromat. A garage off Route 9. A boat shed at the marina. Five fires in four months, none of them fatal, all of them clean. No accelerant the lab can find. No point of origin. No reason for any of it except that somebody wants something to burn.The sixth fire is different. It is on Wexler Street. It is the house Emmett used to live in.And the fire was set the way he used to set them. Low and patient. Started at the base of the door and eaten up through the frame, the way you would if you wanted a house to burn slow. There is a clean gas can in the side yard, wiped down, left exactly where he would find it.Somebody is copying him. Somebody who knows what he did. Somebody who wants him to know they know.Emmett has spent two decades trying to bury the worst thing he ever did. Now someone is digging it up, one fire at a time, and every new flame burns a little closer to the people he still has left.He can solve this. He was the best there ever was at reading a fire. But to catch the man who is burning his past down around him, Emmett has to go back to the night that ruined him. He has to remember what he did and why he did it. And he has to face the one question he has never been able to answer.Was he the only one who got away with it?Point of Origin is a thriller about guilt, obsession, and the fires we set in our own lives. It asks what happens when the past does not stay buried. It asks what a man will do when the only person who can catch a killer is the one who taught him how.Some secrets burn slow. This one has been smoldering for twenty years. And it is about to catch.