Twenty-seven people are dead. The warehouse is gone. Everyone wants to know who caused it. When a catastrophic fire destroys a massive iMarket fulfillment center in Millboro, Alabama, veteran investigator J.D. “Jack” Wilson and his team arrive expecting a familiar problem: find the origin, determine the cause, and follow the evidence to whoever is responsible. The origin is eventually clear enough. Everything after that is harder. The town’s largest employer had spent twelve years making one reasonable decision at a time. Every piece of the disaster has an explanation. None explains twenty-seven deaths by itself. As J.D. reconstructs the final seventy-two hours, the search for a single failure becomes something far more unsettling: an examination of how competent people, functioning systems, and defensible decisions can combine to produce an indefensible result. And waiting outside Millboro is a question Jack cannot investigate with photographs, diagrams, or physical evidence. After more than thirty years of marriage, his wife has asked for a divorce. She cannot tell him exactly why. For a man who has built his career on finding causes, that is almost impossible to accept. But as the investigation forces Jack to distinguish between what started the fire and everything that made the catastrophe possible, he begins to confront an uncomfortable truth about his own life: something can appear to work for years without revealing everything that has been accumulating beneath the surface. Root Cause is a character-driven investigative novel about catastrophe, responsibility, marriage, and the dangerous appeal of simple answers. It asks not merely what went wrong—but whether the most important failures in our lives always have a single cause, a single moment, or someone we can blame.
