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“Burnt Orchid is chilling, heart-wrenching, and painfully authentic. Camryn Lane is a brave new voice in fiction.”

—The New York Times Book Review

Orchid Carder is poised to become the First Lady of Chicago. Her husband, Michael, has just announced his campaign for mayor and he’s the clear front-runner: young, passionate, brilliant, and with a photogenic and altruistic wife on his arm. But Orchid has a secret that could destroy his ambitions. And their marriage. Because Orchid was once an entirely different person: Orchid was once a monster.

Pushed to the limits through neglect, poverty, and abuse, Orchid created an empire on the meanest streets of LA. Collecting damaged girls like coins, she polished them and then used them as currency: to steal, to scam, even to kill. Her gang became a family of sorts, a collective of lost girls who wouldn’t survive on their own. And then, after a devastating tragedy, Orchid found the courage to claw her way out of the muck. She reclaimed a life of goodness and decency that morphed into one of privilege and opportunity. But will the past stay buried? Or will it resurface to destroy everything she has built?

With humanity and compassion, Camryn Lane traces the rise of a girl once driven to the unthinkable, and the young women who populate a dangerous world. Burnt Orchid is a story of struggle, redemption, and the desperate lengths people will go to in order to protect the ones they love.