Should you ever go back?
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' 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 Abby tries to find out what really happened to Kaycee, she unearths an even more disturbing secret-a ritual called "The Game," which will threaten the reputations, and lives, of 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 miles, Bonfire is a dark exploration of the question: can you ever outrun your past?
[My last year of high school, when Kaycee Mitchell and her friends got sick, my father had a bunch of theories]***
(Hutchinson, 7 November 2016, ebook, copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
***
***
Boy was this a corker of a novel. I loved it.
I'm a sucker for books set in small towns, towns where secrets are kept, where things slip under the radar and where everyone keeps each other's secrets. Barrens reminds me a lot of Derry which features in Stephen King's work. The book reminds me a lot of The Falls by Joyce Carol Oates.
The book starts off innocently enough, with Abby investigating what appears to be a simple case of environmental neglect by a big corporation. I loved how the author gradually reveals that something far, far darker is going on.
I liked Abby. I found it interesting she returned to investigate the complaints against Optimal. Surely the fact she's grown up in Barrens would pose difficulty in her being objective? She's a feisty character. She lets her emotions and past connection to the town cloud her judgement at times but that makes her human.
Bonfire is amazing.
