Spider's Bite

"My name is Gin, and I kill people." Gin Blanco is the most feared assassin in the South, known in Ashland as the Spider, an elemental who can call on Ice and Stone. When she is not working she runs the Pork Pit, a barbecue restaurant in the rough half of a city split between wealthy Northtown and the rest.

A job goes wrong. She is double-crossed, and Fletcher Giles — her handler and the closest thing she has to a father — is tortured and killed. That makes it personal, and Gin is not a woman who leaves things unfinished.

The hunt puts her alongside Fletcher's son Finn and against Detective Donovan Caine, an honest cop who wants her in prison and cannot stop wanting her anyway. First in Jennifer Estep's long-running Elemental Assassin series.