Burn Our Bodies Down

BURN OUR BODIES DOWN is all about fire. The rundown apartment Margot Nielsen shares with her single mother always has a candle burning. They must, her mother tells her, keep a fire burning, as "fire is what saves you." Troubled and often neglectful of Margot, her mother is secretive about her past, refusing to answer any of Margot's questions about who her father is or where her mother's family lived. Going through a box of things her mother has pawned at a local shop, she finds a photo and a phone number in a childhood Bible belonging to her mother. When Margot calls the phone number, she reaches her grandmother and learns that she still lives in the small Nebraska town of Phalene, where her mother grew up. Not telling her mother she's leaving, Margot hitchhikes to Phalene, where she quickly learns that the Nielsen family is regarded by the townspeople and the police as nothing but trouble. Margot's own troubles begin within hours of arriving in town, when she helps pull the body of a dead girl from a fire on her grandmother's farm. A girl who looks exactly like her. And this isn't the first fire on her grandmother's farm. There was a fire years ago at the same time her mother's twin sister, Katherine, mysteriously disappeared. Secret after secret is revealed as Margot discovers another Bible, a mysterious set of X-rays with inverted hearts, and the reason "fire is what saves you."