Inglorious Scent

Cole Maddox smells things other people don't.

Copper means violence. Petrichor means something old. Ozone means something's here right now. He spent his twenties tracking exactly that kind of wrongness for an organization that doesn't officially exist. Then he quit, married a woman who never asked the right question, had a son who sees more than he says, and opened the most unremarkable burger joint in Cedarbrook Estates on purpose.

It worked. For seven years, it worked.

Then the Hendersons move in three houses down — a lovely young family with a perfect lawn and a casserole recipe that's genuinely, unsettlingly delicious — and Cole's nose finds a signal it has no name for. Not copper. Not petrichor. Not anything in seven years of careful retirement.

His wife, Maya, has spent their whole marriage choosing not to pull the one thread that would unravel it. She's about four weeks from running out of reasons not to.

Inglorious Scent is a horror novel about a suburb so pleasant it never has to notice what's wrong with it, a marriage built on a very specific kind of love, and a man who's about to find out that quitting a war doesn't mean the war is finished with you. Darkly funny, quietly dreadful, and allergic to the easy scare — this is a book where the casserole is the scariest thing on the table, precisely because it's delicious.