Wrongly imprisoned for killing her abusive husband, Nell is a mother without many options. Her in-laws have sole custody of her daughter Sophie, and all contact between mother and daughter have been severed completely. Hope comes from the most unlikely of places as Nell is recruited into an inmate forest firefighting program. Nell survives weeks of grueling training, while butting heads with Yeager, the hard-driving instructor. After graduating with an award of valor for saving Yeager’s life, Nell is accepted into smoke-jumping school.

Four years later, Nell is assigned as the head of Wildfire 7 – an elite unit of smokejumpers – which includes Yeager, her old instructor, who still isn’t making things easy. As she continues the fight for custody of Sophie, Nell must now deal with Yeager undermining her position while proving her leadership skills to her disgruntled team of veteran smokejumpers. When Sophie joins a weekend camping party in a national park, fate unites mother and daughter when a forest fire breaks out and Wildfire 7 parachutes in to fight it. But as the fire rages out of control and the team heads toward mutiny, Nell’s only chance of reconciliation with Sophie arrives at the worst possible time.