How did it all begin? Before Elizabeth and Richard’s terror-filled mystery week in the Rocky Mountains . . . before murder accompanied their honeymoon . . . before the life-changing English summer when death stalked the Jane Austen Trail . . .

October 1984, the New England hillsides are ablaze with red-gold autumn. Elizabeth is beginning her academic career, and Richard is stuck in the family business. They should be able to help each other with their work, but their meeting strikes sparks and raises old ghosts.

Elizabeth has an academic coup for her dissertation on the cherished American novelist Elswyth Thane within her grasp. Until Richard Spencer blocks her way. Is it possible that the death of Richard’s beloved Mary Ilona really resulted from the fact that she was researching the same subject? Rudyard Kipling, William Beebe, Charles Lindberg, Edna Ferber and a host of celebrities from an age past fill the pages of Elswyth Thane’s letters, but where is Elizabeth to find clues to the mystery haunting Richard?

A nostalgic return to an earlier, now-vanished time, The Flame Ignites charmingly evokes a long-distance relationship between a young woman just testing her wings and a celebrated American novelist. But what about the smoldering relationship between Elizabeth and Richard?