C
C.J. TudorThriller · Suspense
The Burning Girls
Synopsis
Reverend Jack Brooks is a single mother with a fourteen-year-old daughter, Flo, and a painful past. She takes a new post in Chapel Croft, a Sussex village, hoping for a fresh start.
The village offers little comfort. Five hundred years ago, Protestant martyrs were betrayed and burned there. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. Jack's predecessor in the parish seems to have killed himself. On arrival she is handed an exorcism kit and a threatening note.
Then Flo starts to glimpse the burning girls, spectral figures wreathed in flame. Jack is pulled into the village's tangled secrets and the influence of its powerful families, and she begins to look for the truth about the missing girls. At the same time, a killer with a personal connection to her is making his way toward Chapel Croft.
The book blends gothic ghost story, village mystery and thriller. Expect a tense read with plenty of twists, set in a close and watchful community where guilt, faith and old crimes keep surfacing. The haunting and the human threats build side by side, so the unease rarely lets up.
How it reads
- Like others before me have discussed, this book is a mess. Plotwise it doesn't follow cause and effect throughout the story, instead, it has a kind of bifurcation that I can't explain without spoilers, so suffice to say that it doesn't make any sense! Besides that, it's full of offensive stereotypes and tiresome clichés. Most of the villains are cardboard cutouts with vague motives and over-the-top "evil" reactions. Throughout the book we are hit over the head repeatedly with the platitude "people are not born evil" but the author keeps depicting two-dimensional characters that come across as if they were. I simply don't know how it has such a high rating...
- With how highly rated this book is here on Goodreads, I’m clearly m the minority when I say this was not my favorite. Too many things going on, not enough explanation, and the whole “unreliable narrator” thing, while a nice twist, in retrospect felt more like an act of convenience.