The House of Ashes

Zinhle "Zee" Dlamini is a reporter in a scarred South African township, where the smoke still clings to the bones of forgotten homes. She is investigating a string of ritualized arsons that are more than mere acts of destruction—they are acts of memory warfare. A fire meant to purify turns into a tool to obliterate. Every blaze consumes not only property but history, grief, and testimony. There are whispers of spirals in ash, songs half sung in the smoke, and children who remember too much. Zee is drawn into a conspiracy that takes her deeper and deeper into abandoned clinics, disappeared land claims, and tribunals that bury rather than heal when a traumatized girl named Zethu appears, clutching a scorched map and a voice that adults no longer trust. Her past failures haunt Zee and must walk a landscape in which corruption is dressed in robes of reconciliation, and forgetting is a sanctioned industry. But memory fights back. Zee discovers the evidence of systematic dispossession masquerading as 'spiritual cleansing', and realizes that survival is not enough if silence is the victor. Zee must resurrect the stories buried under ash, even if it means bringing justice at the cost of her fragile community and even if it means confronting the fire that nearly burned her alive. A forensic Afro-spiritual crime novel, the House of Ashes is a psychological thriller, historical reckoning, spiritual resistance, a story of trauma, truth, and the war for memory.