He was never leaving his mountain. She was never staying.

FBI Special Agent Mason Quade has spent eleven years learning to read the North Carolina high country he calls home. He knows every trail, every hollow, and every quiet person who lives there. He does not know what to do when Washington sends him Dr. Kyla West.

A forensic entomologist with a fortress built out of nine years and one careful rule, Kyla has come to figure out why a hundred thousand synchronous fireflies have vanished from a cove that had been full of them a year before. Neither the case nor the woman is what Mason expects, and neither of them is prepared for what happens when their reserved professionalism gives way, night by night, in a two-cot yurt above a dying cove.

But something darker than a missing insect population is moving in the mountains around them. And when the case turns from ecology to a foreign operation with reach into their own ground, the careful line Mason and Kyla have been holding will not be enough to keep either of them safe.

A literary romantic suspense set in the ancient forests of the southern Appalachians, Illumination is a slow-burn love story about being seen for the first time, and about what a person will risk to keep someone whole.