Bonfire: The debut thriller from the star of Jessica Jones

by Krysten Ritter

‘A phenomenal, haunting debut’ Gillian Flynn, bestselling author of Gone Girl

'Dark, disturbing, and compulsively readable’ Ruth Ware, bestselling author of In a Dark, Dark Wood and The Woman in Cabin 10

Nothing burns as bright as the truth.

It has been ten years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all 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 economic heart, she begins to find strange connections to a decade-old scandal involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her friends—just before Kaycee disappeared for good.

But as Abby tries desperately to find out what 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, her search threatens the reputations, and lives, of the community and risks exposing a darkness that may consume her.

With tantalizing twists, slow-burning suspense, and a remote, rural town of five claustrophobic miles, Bonfire is a dark exploration of what happens when your past and present collide.

The first novel from the star of Marvel's Jessica Jones and Breaking Bad

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'In Abby Williams Ritter has created an appealingly feisty yet vulnerable heroine...An excellent debut' The Times

'Packed with suspense and moves at a cracking pace...Ritter is spot on. Abby makes a terrific, kickass heroine who you'll root for all the way' Daily Mail

'Dark but compulsively readable' Image Magazine

• ISBN10: 1786331020
• ISBN13: 9781786331021
• Publish Date: 9 November 2017 (first published 7 November 2017)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 8 April 2021
• Publish Country: GB
• Publisher: Cornerstone
• Imprint: Hutchinson
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 288
• Language: English

Reviews

[Amber (The Literary Phoenix)]

This books was … actually really good.

After being burned by Otherworld, I tread carefully when it comes to actors-turned-writers. Still, I adore Krysten Ritter and couldn’t talk myself out of Bonfire. I don’t read a lot of thrillers, but I do read some, and I love one that’s well-written.

I think I need to come at this book from two different angles – technique, and entertainment.

From a technique perspective, Bonfire reads very much like a debut. It’s a little messy and could use some tightening up. For example, I noticed two different points in the first 15% of the audiobook where our protagonist, Abby Williams, let out a breath she didn’t know she was holding. I brace myself after that, ready for more of the worst cliches… and you know? They didn’t really happen.

Don’t get me wrong, there were quite a lot of tropes and the general gist of the ending was very predictable. It’s not a perfect book. But. It was thoroughly entertaining, and really? That’s what matters. I was in this book for the journey and I gobbled it up.

When we meet Abby, she says she’s going back to Barrons because she wants to look into a big company poisoning the water supply. And while that’s all well and good, we know from the moment she says it that Abby Williams is definitely lying to herself and we want to know everything. BOOM. Hooked. Of course, breaching environmental law is one thing, and she cares about it, but that’s not why she’s here. We are introduced to Casey Mitchell in waves, and every little bit makes you more curious. It took me a while to get a feel for Casey, because I wanted to hate her, but I wasn’t sure it was all true. I wasn’t sure if Abby was an unreliable narrator – I knew other characters were unreliable – and I spent a lot of time trying to make up my mind about things. Especially about Casey.

You may know the name Abigail Williams from The Crucible, and in the context of Bonfire, Krysten chose her main character’s name so well. I’m not sure if it was intentional or not, but lending back to the Salem’s Witch Trials and Arthur Miller’s tale of the girls who faked possession was perfect for this situation, because while Abby herself was not involved, this is, in part, a story about girls faking something terrible to scare people and get attention. Just a small nerdy aside, but I really enjoyed the allusion.

There are a lot of mysteries tied up in Bonfire and they all get unraveled at the end. There were a lot of little things I liked. Things like the lawyer’s collective that were trying to keep Abby focused. That the trope characters were balanced by very real people, so they felt less like tropes and more like terrible people wearing masks. The love triangle was ridiculous and I wanted to be hateful, but I really liked how Krysten worked everything out in the end.

Ultimately, if you’re a fan of thrillers, this one is pretty good. It’s not stylistically perfect, but Bonfire will ensnare you and keep you eagerly turning pages, looking for more. If Krysten Ritter decides to write another book, I’d happily read it.

[Quirky Cat]

Bonfire is Krysten Ritter’s (you may know her as Jessica Jones from a series of the same name, on Netflix) debut novel. In my opinion actors turning authors is a bit of a hit or miss scenario, either they’re wonderful or they’re a flop. In this case I think Ritter managed to get her book on the side of hit, as I found myself greatly enjoying it (I read it all in one sitting).



Warnings first: There are a few different scenes that talk about animal death in this novel. The main character’s dog is murdered, and that fact (as well as some of the details) comes up quite a bit. There’s also some hunting scenes described. Along with those scenes is something called ‘the Game’ that the school boys did; getting pictures of girls in compromising positions and then sharing those photos. This is pretty alarming to say the least, and at least one suicide is mentioned as a direct result of it.
Bonfire is set in a small town named Barrens. It’s described as a company town, and that certainly is an accurate description; Optimal Plastics seems to own, pay for or employ more than half of everything in the town. And yet despite their size, they never seem to have even the smallest infraction on their records. That’s why Abby is in town, well, that’s why she says she’s in town. It’s her job to make sure Optimal Plastics isn’t contaminating the town’s water source. Getting the townspeople to listen to that is a whole different story though.
Throughout the novel the history of Barrens is slowly revealed. Optimal Plastics has been buying their way into the town for years, slowly leaking corruption as it goes. A group of girls pretend to be sick, the ringleader named Kaycee. Abby has her doubts about how fake the whole thing was, but nobody seems willing to humor her theories. As Abby digs deeper to unravel the mystery of her past, she starts turning up more and more unexpected bits of information.
Abby is an interesting character; she’s clearly traumatized and obsessed with her past, and frankly who can blame her? Most of the people in town were pretty horrible to her when she was younger, even more so than they were to each other (which is saying something). Her father hid from his loss and pain by diving into religion, leaving her alone. Her best childhood friend betrayed her, and in my opinion did some things that were pretty unforgivable (such as killing her dog). Despite all the pain she’s suffered, she’s come back to down, determined to figure out the cause of a strange series of events that happened when she was a teenager. I’m not sure I would have been able to do what she did. Abby also delivers one of my favorite lines during the novel (“Worse. I’m a lawyer.”); which helps to show how she can appreciate the humor in her situation and in her job, a helpful attribute to have to say the least.
Bonfire is very heavily character driven; nothing in this story would have happened (or rather, been revealed), had Abby not stuck to her guns and continued onward. It’s her obsession with Kaycee and the past that resolves the mystery of Barrens (the mystery nobody would look at). I found this story to be a refreshing change of pace.
As debut novels go, Bonfire was pretty decent. I can’t wait to see if Krysten Ritter continues with her writing career, and if so, what she comes out with next.


For more reviews, check out Quirky Cat's Fat Stacks