Wow!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Excellent read. A woman working for an environmental watchdog company as a lawyer, Abby Williams, goes back to her hometown. A hometown she hasn’t visited in a decade. She left 3 days after her high school graduation. She was “friends” with Kaycee, a girl who could be very mean spirited and who hung out with the popular girls. Kaycee left town shortly before Abby. Abby was not popular and was actually picked on, a lot, by the popular girls. In her venture to find out what Optimal, the corporation her company is investigating, she is drawn back to her high school days. Trying to make sense of it all, she finds a hidden darkness that has been secret for the pas decade. Not only that, it’s a secret that is still going on.

An absolutely mesmerizing thriller that I could not put down, well let’s say I didn’t want to, but sometimes there are distractions you can’t help. Ha!

Gripping, haunting and pulse racing I thoroughly enjoyed the heck out of this book. I ended it with a huge fist pump and a loud “yes” when all the discoveries were brought to light.

I was very intrigued when I saw that Krysten Ritter had written a book. I first noticed her in the TV show about the “B” in Apartment 23 (still unsure why that show was cancelled) and was very excited that I received this galley.

Huge thanks to Crown Publishing and Net Galley for providing me with a free e-Galley in exchange for an honest, unbiased review.

I was originally interested in this book because I'm a fan of Krysten Ritter's work on Jessica Jones. It turns out she is also a talented writer. Bonfire is the story of Abby Williams, a woman from a small town in Indiana who has been living in Chicago for ten years. When her work as an environmental lawyer leads her back to her hometown, she is forced to confront her troubled past, especially the uncertainty of what happened to one of her classmates. Abby reminded me of Jessica Jones in that even though she struggles to deal with the demons of her past she keeps fighting until she finds the truth. Fans of Jessica Jones will especially enjoy this book, but it will also appeal to anyone who likes a gritty thriller with a complicated hero.

I was drawn in right from the beginning, telling myself I would just start it with a chapter or two before bed. 25% of the book later I finally couldn’t stay up and had to put it down for the night. By the time I got to 50% you could not pry this book from my hands without fear of injury because I was so engrossed in the story. I finished the last half in one sitting. The suspense was so well done and there were plenty of twists and surprises. The whole story took a very different direction than where I thought it was going. That direction turned out to be very dark and disturbing and I was a bit shocked by how gritty and raw it was I guess because the author is Krysten Ritter I expected it to be witty, smart, darkly funny but I wasn’t anticipating just how dark it would become.

The main character Abby is absolutely the standout of this book. She’s such a compelling character that I loved and hated, admired and pitied all at once. Abby is seriously messed up but I couldn’t help but like her anyway. As Abby returns to her hometown of Barrens and the story of her past begins to unravel we see why she is such a hot mess and it’s entirely understandable. She’s obviously intelligent but drinks too much and it enables her bad behaviour. She has a difficult relationship with her father and was bullied by her former best friend Kaycee and her minions/mean girls through high school.

Despite her issues Abby is admirable for her work in protecting the environment and people from toxic chemicals. The first part of the book is mostly about Optimal, a big plastics company allegedly polluting the local water supply. I totally sounded like a lawyer in that previous sentence! Since the economy of pretty well the entire town depends on the company no one is very inclined to help her find evidence or to speak against the company. There are the a few complaints of skin rashes and crop failure but as Abby digs deeper she finds much more serious health issues. The company begins to look increasingly sinister.

Two men capture Abby’s attention, her high school crush who now works for Optimal, and Condor, high school burn out and her neighbour in Barrens. It was obvious to me which one was the right choice but Abby does not generally make good decisions. At about 90% in she makes a terrible choice to trust someone that I knew she shouldn’t. It was like in a horror movie when you are screaming for the character not to go down to the basement, but they do and it ends badly. As I said previously, Abby has pretty poor judgement so it wasn’t a surprise and I was cringing for her blindness to his obvious smarminess.

The ending was satisfying, although not a completely happily ever after. I suspect we’ll be seeing more of Abby in the future because this book seems like the start of a great series. I have to admit that I pictured Abby as Krysten right from the start and this book would be a good fit for a TV show or movie.

3 1/2 Stars
A solid detective story, but never completely reeled me in. There was a bit of predictable mystery, but very little suspense. At times the storyline seemed all over the place as it bounced back and forth in time, sometimes paragraph by paragraph. The protagonist's drunken binges became wearing as the story unfolded. While a good read, not a must read.

so yeah, i totally requested this book from netgalley because i like krysten ritter and i was curious (thanks for the arc netgalley!). i had no idea what it was about but i was like sure! i'll give it a go.

i feel like this book starts off super erin bockovich-y and then all of a sudden is a mystery and dealing with some heavy stuff and possible foul play.

this book was just okay to me. for the most part i thought it was well written and paced well, though at times it either felt like it was dragging or rushed. i was shocked at the twists, i had an inkling who the bad guy was but didn't know why or how, just knew that i didn't like that person.

i didn't much like the main character either. I wanted to shake her sometimes, not to mention tell her to stop drinking. i don't think you're supposed to like her, but still. if she was a more likable character perhaps i would have liked the book more.

I feel like there were a lot of story lines and maybe i am just not a good mystery reader, but they didn't really seem like they all fit together and were explained in the end.

overall, i guess i'd recommend it if it sounds like your jam, though i don't think i will personally pick up another book by krysten ritter - only because this isn't really my preferred genre, nothing against her as a writer.

Abby Williams left her father and her hometown of Barrens, Indiana after graduation with no plans of returning. Now she an environmental attorney, and after ten years is returning to the place she dreads. She wasn’t popular in school and the cool kids tormented her and now as adults she must confront them to learn more about Optimal Plastics and the possibility of them contaminating the water supply. But Optimal has kept this town alive all these years.

Not only does Abby and her coworkers find resistance, she also deals with having to face her past. Why did her childhood friend/high school bully Kaycee Mitchell leave and never return or communicate with anyone? As the story develops, we learn not only Abby’s secrets but everyone else’s in what is a small town. It is certainly a riveting novel that I recommend.

Krysten Ritter’s debut novel feels like Erin Bockovich meets Jessica Jones. Abby is dragged back to her hometown to look into the town’s biggest employer and possible environmental problems. As reminders of her childhood friend’s disappearance pop up, she begins to suspect that there might have been foul play even back then.

Very well-paced and terrifyingly plausible story.

I haven’t had much luck recently with new authors for mysteries, but I couldn’t help myself when I saw that Krysten Ritter wrote a book. Somehow when I was looking at it, I assumed it was a young adult book and was surprised to find that it wasn’t. While a lot of the flashbacks really made it reminiscent of YA, it is a solid adult thriller.

I loved the slow-burning small town feel of this book. While Abby is back in her hometown to look into Optimal Plastics, she really has a lot of unresolved issues from her high school years. Optimal owns the town of Barrens and has brought them back from economic ruin, which makes Abby’s job more difficult when she looks for flaws in their sterling reputation. Abby was a bit of an unreliable narrator because she had a lot of emotional ties to the town which made this case personal and she did some heavy drinking throughout the book and couldn’t seem to fully remember what was happening. Part of Abby’s personal vendetta goes back to high school and the mean girls that tormented her. Kaycee was the ringleader of the mean girls, but she’s also one of the reasons Abby is convinced that Optimal is doing more harm than good.

Rumor has it that Kaycee and her friends were pretending to be sick in order to get money from Optimal, but Kaycee ran off after the other girls came clean that they were lying. Abby is convinced that Kaycee was truly sick, but no one in the town will believe her. She struggles with her investigation because the rest of her legal team can see that her personal ties are clouding her judgement and she’s not always making the best choices. So Abby does what every determined narrator does and she goes off on her own. I loved that no matter what a character said, their story always seemed a little too plausible, or was tainted with some previous memory that makes the reader uncertain if they should be trusted. Each new revelation brought more questions and almost another mystery to solve.

Abby was an interesting character and I really felt for her even if I didn’t see much of myself in her. She has a lot of family baggage and her father was one of the reasons she didn’t want to return to Barrens. Abby’s father isn’t really the same man she left and it was sad to see her struggle with how to feel about him at this point in his life. Abby’s previous prejudice seems to taint her interactions with everyone from her past. When they don’t react as she expects or she sees what their lives have become, they become less of a faceless evil and instead sad people that made poor decisions.

I was impressed with Ritter’s debut and I hope she writes more books. This was a really good mystery, but it also made me think about my memories of people from high school and how much people can change as they mature and become adults. I also kept envisioning this as a tv series, and I really think the flashbacks would make this one a tense show to watch!

Krysten Ritter's compelling crime debut is - to me - as if Ruth Ware wrote a draft of Erin Brockovich. It's a mysterious, fast-paced novel full of timely controversies and personal demons. The flawed heroine, Abby, is a woman who's moved on to the big city, found success, earned a great apartment and a great wardrobe - and effectively erased the person she was in high school. But when she chases a corruption case back to her small hometown, she can't help but pull at the strands that could destroy it all.

I really enjoyed this novel, and totally recommend it to fans of the genre.

NOTE: Stuff in [brackets] is whited out and must be highlighted to be read. I do not do this for every book, but if a major spoiler plot point colors my final rating, and needs elaboration, I will.
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Bit o Background:
Yes, this book is written by that Krysten Ritter.

Thoughts:

I liked it. Not only did I consistantly want to find out what really happened to Kaycee, it also has some subtle PSAs sprinkled in. We need more books that address these specific problems.

However, it's not perfect. The conclusion undermines the bullying issues that are mentioned throughout. I don't believe that's the intent of the book. It just took on too many issues at the same time and tried to tie them together. It's admirable, but it doesn't work.

Why specifically it didn't work for me...
SPOILER (mouse over to reveal) [In the end it turns out the bullying that has been occurring for at least 10 years was not only funded by, but also the original idea of the Big Bad Business that moved into town. This bothers me because most bullying, especially the sort of taking nude/semi-nude pictures of young women without their permission and distributing them, has nothing to do with business and everything to do with bullying and general entitlement.
No, the bullies are not left completely unpunished, but the end gives the impression that removing the Bad Business from town solves the problem. And that's not how these things work.]

Verdict:
3/5
The plot is a bit overreaching, but it's a solid thriller. If she's writing another book, I'd read it!

So let's get the obvious out of the way. Anyone who knows Krysten Ritter's work as an actor knows that she's a compelling performer (Marvel's Jessica Jones, Breaking Bad). As it turns out, Ritter has considerable skill as a writer, as well. This is definitely not a vanity publication such as one might see with many other performers of various genres. So just get that one right out of your head, if you were wondering.

Set in the fictional small town of Barrens (such an apt name), Indiana, Bonfire is a suspense novel that initially seems to have an Erin Brockovich feel but takes a sharp left turn into a mystery. Abby Williams, a local woman who left Barrens at eighteen and who has become a lawyer, has returned to her hometown to investigate reported environmental contamination by the corporation which practically owns the town and its residents, Optimal Plastics. Abby is haunted by memories of her frenemy Kaycee, a young woman who seems to have run away from Barrens after being caught in a web of deceit. In a town where everything seems to be built on a platform of lies and graft, Abby encounters peers from her past and comes to terms with her aging father's health. The element of claustrophobia from the small town atmosphere is palpable. The foibles of Ritter's characters are so well written and the passages dealing with Abby and her father are very poignant ones. The ways we process, sometimes incorrectly, our blurred memories of the past were so well-drawn. As the mysteries of what is going on with Optimal Plastics and Kaycee deepen and eventually intersect, the reader gets drawn into a classic "can't put it down" story. While you may suspect some facts of that story early on, the whys and hows play out in surprising ways.

While I found some aspects of the plot to be rather hazy in rationale toward the end of the book, on the strength of her character development, this is a strong debut novel. I look forward to Ritter's next novel.

I really enjoyed this book. It almost felt at times like there were 2 different parallel storylines going on, but for the most part they all tied together nicely. Good character development, I thought at first the drinking was a little strange, but given her history, it makes sense.

I love the cover of this book, it caught my eye right away. I wasn’t sure if the author, Krysten Ritter was the same person as the actress who played Jane from Breaking Bad. Remember her dying in the bed while Walter White watched? Yes, it’s the same actress. I am super excited to read this mystery!

Here’s what you need to know:

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?

This sounds like it has the potential to be one of those books that you don’t want to put down until every last question is answered. Those on Goodreads have been raving about this novel and praising Krysten for being not only a great actress but great writer too!

Bonfire is slow to start, but once the flame gets going there’s no stopping this story.

I grew up in a small agricultural town and my ten-year high school reunion is coming up next year. I haven’t seen many of the kids I went to school with since graduation so I could relate to Abby Williams’ conflicted feelings of simultaneously wanted in to see what had become of everyone and wanting to avoid all those people and the many heavy memories that would accompany their faces.

Krysten Ritter is famous most recently for her role as Jessica Jones in the Netflix show of the same name and it was a little challenging separating Jessica Jones from Bonfire‘s Abigail Williams in my head.

The story was a little slow to start, but as I said in my introduction, once the fuel Ritter laid down was lit, Bonfire was a roaring plot and I flipped through the pages as quickly as I could.

I generally prefer fantasy or science fiction over thrillers but Bonfire was a satisfying read.

What an engaging novel. Yes, Krysten Ritter is an actress but she also developed an intriguing plot and wrote a good novel. (I definitely heard Ritter narrating the first 50 pages in my mind and then it calmed down.) Abby Williams left her hometown of Barrens, IN as soon as she could after high school and now she has to return. Someone has complained that the big industrial company in town is doing harm to the environment and Abby's firm has to see if the complaints have merit.

But returning to her hometown brings back memories Abby has barely pushed to the back of her mind - like the cruel things people used to say to her. Or the time the girls in the powerful clique all pretended to be sick from a mysterious ailment. (Were they pretending?)

But most of all, Abby is haunted by the disappearance of Kaycee, the ringleader of the clique and her best friend when they were younger. What was the real reason Kaycee left and who in Barrens knows the truth? It's an uncomfortable reunion as Abby encounters one classmate after another as she seeks answers.

The plot twists are well designed and several answers are unexpected. Don't expect to love these townies- it's not that kind of town. But Ritter will keep you engaged all the way to the bitter end.

This book kept me guessing until right at the end! Throughout the entire book my mind was racing. Each time I thought I had it figured out there would be a twist in the plot that threw me off. It was a good quick read. I couldn't put it down and couldn't wait to get to the end and see all of the pieces come together. I would definitely recommend reading this one!

Thank you to Netgalley, the publishing house and especially, the author, for the opportunity to read this book in return for my honest opinion.

I did not know that as well as being a great actress, Krysten Ritter, is a great author. I really enjoyed this book.

Abby Williams said she would never go back home, but her job led her there and gave her the opportunity to try to get closure of a mystery that had bothered her for years. This was a small town as its worst, it makes you want to drive around small towns like this. Was this town as odd as it seemed or was Abby just remembering things differently; her old high school crush was still in town as well as the girls who bullied her, had time changed them? What was wrong with this town, is there something wrong with their water supply or was it really a few bitter people?

I enjoyed how this story played out, I wavered back and forth of the veracity of some of the characters. I was pleased with the ending, it was fitting.

I will definitely check out any other books Ms Ritter writes.

Far from the vanity projects many celebrities tend to write (or attach their names to without ever actually constructing a sentence), Ritter's debut novel is suspenseful and gripping. Bonfire is right on trend with the "flawed female protagonist with a dark past" genre that's been booming since Gone Girl, and it actually manages to be better than many entries that have come before it. The final reveal isn't all that surprising, but given Abby's past and present insecurities, it makes sense that she wouldn't see it coming as easily as readers may.

Not all the characters are as round as Abby, which is the only real shortcoming of Bonfire, an otherwise engrossing slow-burn.

Unlike most celebrity-written books this was a well written suspense novel. It sucked me in on page one and did not let go until the end. Without giving everything away, I will say the ending is not super predictable, although you knew something was afoot and that all of the players who needed to get what was coming to them got it.

Was I little skeptical of Krysten Ritter's book? Yes. The last fiction I read by a celebrity author disappointed me, and I was anticipating that Bonfire might be a let-down as well. But a compelling story and writing that I would find to be well done by any debut author drew me into this book pretty quickly, and I'm happy to say that I'd love to read more by Ritter. It wasn't perfect writing (the main character lets out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding in the first chapter), but the story was so consuming that a few cliches are forgiven. Abby has come back to her tiny hometown to investigate environmental alligations against the largest employer and funding source in town. She left town after high school and hasn't looked back since, and she's finding that being back isn't making her childhood seem any rosier. While working on the case that brought her back to town, Abby starts to wonder if there's any connection to the illness and then disappearance of her once friend turned high school tormenter, Kaycee. This small town is full of secrets and cover ups, and Abby is determined to get answers.
Abby is an interesting character, and partway through the book she seems to become somewhat unreliable. I'd actually love if Ritter wrote more books featuring Abby, because she's full of baggage and I think there's more to unpack. The story is fast paced and the crimes and suspicions become more and more sordid and painful as the story goes on. The ending wraps up rather quickly- but again, I'd love if we did get to see more of Abby someday. A well done debut!