Bonfire
A Novel
-
-
4.1 • 112 Ratings
-
-
- $6.99
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
“A phenomenal, haunting debut.”—Gillian Flynn
Nothing burns as bright as the truth.
It has been ten years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all visible evidence of her small-town roots. Now working as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, she has a thriving career, a modern apartment, and her pick of meaningless one-night stands.
But when a new case takes her back home to Barrens, Indiana, the life Abby painstakingly created begins to crack. Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town’s most high-profile company and economic heart, Abby begins to find strange connections to Barrens’s biggest scandal from more than a decade ago, involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her closest friends—just before Kaycee disappeared for good.
Abby knows the key to solving any case lies in the weak spots, the unanswered questions. But as she tries desperately to find out what really happened to Kaycee, troubling memories begin to resurface and she begins to doubt her own observations. And when she unearths an even more disturbing secret—a ritual called “The Game”—it will threaten reputations, and lives, in the community and risk exposing a darkness that may consume her.
With tantalizing twists, slow-burning suspense, and a remote rural town of just five claustrophobic square miles, Bonfire is a dark exploration of what happens when your past and present collide.
Praise for Bonfire
“I burned through Krysten Ritter's hugely accomplished debut. Bonfire is dark, disturbing, and compulsively readable.”—Ruth Ware, bestselling author of The Woman in Cabin 10
“The Jessica Jones star makes an auspicious literary debut with Bonfire, spinning a suspenseful, psychologically gripping story.”—Entertainment Weekly
“In this adroit debut the star of Marvel's Jessica Jones proves her talents aren't limited to acting. . . . [Bonfire is] a thriller that delivers suspense, surprise and satisfaction.”—People
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actress Ritter (Marvel's Jessica Jones) makes a triumphant fiction debut with this pulse-pounding thriller featuring a sympathetic, broken lead character. Ten years after leaving her hometown of Barrens, Ind., Chicago attorney Abby Williams returns as part of a legal team considering civil litigation against Optimal Plastics, a corporation whose chemicals may have caused illness and damaged crops. The professional challenge is daunting: Optimal has bought off much of the town, including a prosecutor who began a case against the company, until it swelled his campaign coffers for political office. Abby finds links to a case from more than a decade earlier, the disappearance of popular Kaycee Mitchell. On the personal side, Abby is unable to escape the grip of the past: a claque of mean girls relentlessly bullied her during high school, and her one surviving relative is her abusive father, who's declining mentally and physically. Abby's noirish worldview (she divides humanity into "the people of the world who squeeze and the ones who suffocate") is pitch-perfect, and Ritter effectively uses Abby's present-tense narration to create immediacy.
Customer Reviews
Loved this book!
I’m a huge fan of Gillian Flynn and this reminded me a lot of Sharp Objects, but with a different twists and turns and less self deprecation. I’ve been searching for good, thrilling books, but most I’ve read have been slow or super predictable. This was not! I flew through this book in 2 days I could not put it down! I had my suspicions about what happened to Kacee or who the villain would end up being, but there was a twist at the end I definitely didn’t see coming!!
Read this in 2 days!
Could not put it down! Great read and storyline!
Bonfire
Really good twist to the end.