Dame Polara spent her childhood picking locks, tailing suspects, and helping her hard-boiled PI father solve cases. She knows all the tricks of the trade, but long ago ran from her father’s shady, often dangerous profession. What Dame wants now is simple: her safe job preserving heritage buildings, adequate care for her aging father, and to start a family of her own. But you can’t always get what you want.
After serving her an eviction notice, Dame’s landlord offers her an alternative: she can keep her apartment if she investigates his mysterious—and possibly unfaithful—wife. When the investigation uncovers a serial arsonist burning down the very buildings Dame fights to preserve, she finds herself pulled back into the seedy underworld of her father’s profession. Now, a target, she must deploy all the skills he taught her if she’s to protect herself and the people she cares about most.
Greg Rhyno’s WHO BY FIRE, the first novel in the Dame Polara mystery series, has sold to Marc Côte at Cormorant Books in a three-book deal.
This new series follows a reluctant detective who must rely on the skills she learned from her hardboiled PI father to uncover and survive a dangerous arson conspiracy.
“Like so many reluctant detectives before her, Dame Polara’s complex past and detective dad makes her the perfect person to find and pursue wrong-doing amidst the moral decay around her and in Toronto,” says The Rights Factory agent Sam Hiyate. “Rhyno has given us a new, big-hearted and compelling character to follow in her first three big cases.”