East Los Angeles, 1968. Fifteen-year-old Nico Reyes plays his mother's guitar on the rooftops and street corners of Boyle Heights, and when he plays, the world leans closer. Strangers weep. Old women stop mid-sentence. Doors open that were never doors.

He doesn't know the wood was blessed by a man whose name nobody wrote down. He doesn't know his mother soaked each string in water carried from three rivers before she went quiet. He only knows that the music is waking something up.

Something else is awake too. It has worn a priest's collar and a cop's badge and, in 1943, a sailor's uniform. This time it comes wearing the face of the paletero every child on First Street trusts. The barrio calls it El Silbon, the Whistler, and it arrives whenever a neighborhood starts to remember its own power. It eats memory. It eats music. It eats the way grandmothers teach their granddaughters how to be grandmothers - and Nico's playing has made it hungry.

To fight it, Nico will need a bruja who reads omens in broken neon, a keeper of the dead who lives behind the Lincoln Heights cemetery, a boy taught to burn his own murals, and an aunt who keeps making tamales because the world does not stop needing to be fed. What it will cost him is everything. What it offers instead is a safe, ordinary, forgettable life.

STRINGS OF FIRE is a folk-horror ballad of music, memory, and inheritance - a novel about a barrio that refuses to be erased, and the boy whose song becomes the argument.