Smoke Screen

Smoke Screen is a novel by the American writer Sandra Brown, published in 2008 and set in Charleston.

Britt is a television journalist with a reputation she has worked for, and she wakes up with no memory of the evening and a dead man in the room, a position that gets worse the harder the police look at it. The fire five years earlier made heroes of four officials, and the man assigned to establish how it started was taken off the case before he could finish. Brown alternates between the present investigation and the earlier events, so the reader learns what the four men did before Britt understands why somebody has begun killing them. The novel is about a public story the whole city has agreed to and the private arrangement underneath it.

It is one of a long series of suspense novels by the author, and its plot turns on the gap between a public reputation and a private record that nobody wanted examined, least of all the men who benefited from it.