I found this to be an interesting book. Definitely a whodunit that keeps you guessing. I felt as if I were walking through this entire book, seeing it through the eyes of Catherine, who runs the Burial Society, trying to figure out how she failed one of her clients.

It wasn't an easy book to read but it definitely kept me interested and engaged and I finished it. I did feel that the author did a skillful job with her characterization and her plot ending was satisfied.

A great premise -- a shadowy organization that rescues people from dangerous situations and helps them escape into new, safe lives. Catherine is at the helm of this "Burial Society" and gets fixated on the 'one that got away' when she hears that new tragedy has struck a family where she was unable to save a client due to Catherine's own mistake. Her guilt gets her involved in this sorry saga.

I enjoyed this psychological thriller but just could not get too invested in the Burrows' storyline and, unfortunately, those characters ended up forming most of the narrative. I was so much more interested in hearing about other rescues and saves and I did not care for Natalie or any of the family. Told in alternating chapters from the point of view of Catherine, Jake, and Natalie, the different perspectives make it somewhat difficult to figure out what is really going on. The mystery involves figuring out who killed whom and why. Easy to guess that so I wasn't surprised. NO SPOILERS.

I do have the second book featuring Catherine in my queue and will read it next so I hope that the plot is different to this one and deals with different rescues more suited to the stated mission of the Burial Society.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine Books for this e-book ARC to read and review.

I read Nina Sadowsky’s first book, Just Fall, and loved it, so I was very anxious to read Burial Society. It did not disappoint.

Nina knows how to keep a story moving and get you invested in the characters. The novel is about a woman who rescues abused women via her dark-net based witness protection program. But her past comes back to complicate things. I love the idea of making mistakes and then making amends.

If you haven’t read Just Fall: A NovelI highly recommend that book, as well.

Adequate for a bridge between genre and literary thrillers. However, there's very little here that can't be found in several novels. That said, Sadowsky's novel is satisfying and skillfully rendered

Thought provoking book....a who done it that keeps you guessing.

You walk through the entire book from the eyes of Catherine who runs The Burial Society as she tries to figure out how she failed a client. Not an easy book but one that definitely keeps you engaged.

I was very excited to be given the opportunity by NETGALLEY to read and review "The Burial Society" by Nina Sadowsky. She is quickly becoming one of my favorite authors, with her twist and turn thrillers. "Just Fall" was a surprise and so is this one.

Catherine runs the Burial Society, which when you first hear about it , your not quite sure what it is. It is a society that helps out abused women by relocating them and having them set up for a future.

Catherine had one switch that did not go as planned and now it has come back to haunt her. Jake and Natalie's mother asked for help and it didn't go well. Then later, Jake and Natalie's father ends up dead and Catherine has put herself into the investigation.

We learn a lot about the Burrows family, Jake and Natalie did tend to get on my nerves a bit but I had to realize what they were going through. As the story goes on, so do the twist and turns. Story is told by different points of view and the ending is not what you thought it would be.

Typical thriller, I find that books like this bore me because they are all the same. Would not recommend.

I had never heard of burial societies before reading this novel. Burial societies are defined by Wikipedia as,

a form of friendly society. These groups historically existed in England and elsewhere, and were constituted for the purpose of providing by voluntary subscriptions for the funeral expenses of the husband, wife or child of a member, or of the widow of a deceased member. Some also allowed for insuring money to be paid on the death of a member.[1]
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burial_society)
Nina Sadowsky weaves a tale of a different kind of burial society. One that exists to bury people’s lives by creating a new existence for them. Our protagonist, Catherine, is responsible for moving women into these new lives. Catherine lives a vaporous existence. Always changing, always morphing into a new identity to preserve her own life. “I traffic in others’ secrets, but don’t want anyone knowing mine.” Every time she assists The Burial Society, she puts her own life in peril. Yet, this is her world. What she chooses to do make right the wrongs that exist for women.
The Burial Society skillfully illustrates this hidden world by using a faceless, nameless narrator to tell the story of a family touched by tragedy. An extraordinarily dysfunctional family where every member has something to hide. With all the secrets, it’s hard to know who is innocent and who is guilty. But in their own ways, everyone is guilty of something. Jake, keeping his lifestyle secret. Frank, trying to protect his family. Brian, what all is he hiding? Natalie, so much to hide. This family on the surface appears to have it all. The longer you look, the more you can see the cracks and chips of damaged people.
Ms. Sadowsky masterfully controls the story by only sharing bits at the right time. The writing is riveting.
“Hands can do many things. Build a fire, make a sandwich, paint a landscape, toss a football, fly across a keyboard. Caress a lover, soap a back, rub out a solitary orgasm. Wield a razor, swing a baseball bat, punch a heavy bag. Pull a trigger. Choke a neck until all breath is stilled.”
Wow. The unexpected elements of this story grab your attention and hold on tight. I don’t often have time to just sit and go through an entire book in a weekend, but I couldn’t put this one down. Forget the laundry and dishes and dinner, just read! Truly, you won’t be disappointed.

A very unexpected book. I was initially put off by the choppy, short chapters, but after I got into the book I moved past it and really enjoyed the story. The Burial Society is run by a woman named Catherine and relocates women who have been abused by their husbands. Her one failure was a woman named Mallory, who was murdered before Catherine could reach her.

Now Mallory's family is in Paris, and her husband Brian is found murdered by his daughter Natalie and his son Jake. Catherine feels guilty because she didn't rescue Mallory, and she wants to find out who murdered Brian to pay her debt.

The plot takes some dark twists and turns, but I enjoyed it very much. I recommend this book.

Thanks to Ballantine Books and NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Wonderfully written!! Would definitely reread this book!

A heroine who creates a secret 'society' that tries to help people and right wrongs, while engaging her own personal battles is the focus of The Burial Society. Those she tried to help are given their perspectives as well throughout the story, which lends an understanding of those involved.
Great plot, some nice twists, and full characters give this a huge thumbs up
from me- definitely a good one!

5 star Amazon reveiw
I love "The Burial Society!" It's a thriller with some surprising extras on relationships, and a refreshing cleverness throughout. After reading it, I listened to the audio version, which is well done and added a new dimension. Catherine's mission is running The Burial Society to save women from their abusers. There are some gritty scenes, a character with mental illness, and a peek at the raunchy underbelly of Paris. Short chapters make it easy to switch gears into the more domestic settings. My favorite parts are the insights about what makes the characters tick. The teen siblings, Natalie and Jake, whose mother went missing about a year ago, are realistically tough on the outside, yet have tender emotions. Their father Brian and Uncle Frank are brothers, whose childhoods were overshadowed by their mother losing a baby to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. There's a quirky bit about the nursing home where their mother lives being named "Meadowfield." Wonderful scene descriptions sprinkled with vivid details like savoring a piece of chocolate cake, made for a tight writing style that reminded me somewhat of "The Woman in the Window" by AJ Finn. Parts of this book by Nina Sadowsky will stay with you after you turn the last page. "Her body aches. She realizes she has forgotten how physical grief can be." (Natalie) "Just because you have your own agenda, it doesn't mean you're not servicing someone else's." (from Catherine, who runs The Burial Society). Highly recommended read!

A well written suspense that is so good you feel like you are underwater because you keep holding your breath. The burial society is an organization that helps abused women escape their abusers. This is such a dive into that world that you don't want to have to use but are so glad is there for the women who need it. Engrossing, fast, and terrifying!

*trigger warning**Self Harm

To be honest this book wasn't horrible, it wasn't great, not something I would wholeheartedly recommend over and over to the right person. It was just blah. I was expecting more on the "Burial Society" side versus what I got. It was hard to jump through so many characters point of views with every chapter and found myself struggling at first. I almost didn't finish it and when I did, I felt nothing...nothing...I can't remember the last time reading a book and literally feeling NOTHING at the end.

This book kept me guessing, and I was genuinely surprised by the outcome! It's suspenseful, and intriguing!

** spoiler alert ** Told from alternating points of view was a great way to setup this story because it keeps you guessing as to who was the actual murderer since each character seemed to have a motive and you got to see the characters through one another's eyes. I thoroughly enjoyed this story from beginning to end thanks to the great development of characters and plotline. I received a copy of this book from the author via netgalley.
9 likes

I did not finish the advanced readers copy for this title. It was not what I expected at all, and found the alternating chapters and time frames annoying. I did not feel anything for Natalie, Catherine, or the other characters, particularly after some descriptive strange club scenes. Sorry, not for me.

The Burial Society has the sort of passages and fantastic phrasings you could highlight all day long, but there's no real connection between those and the story itself. The concept of a business that extracts people from dangerous, unsafe conditions and helps them start anew, all while getting revenge against the bad guys, is fantastic, but it's a large idea that requires a lot of book to come to life. We're sold on this book by the blurb, with varying people expressing their opinion on whether we should be told Natalie's story or Catherine's story...rather than told five different character's stories all at once, which is what we really get. There's Catherine, Natalie, Jake, Frank, and their poor deceased mother. There's the present day, the past, first person perspective, and even third person perspective all mixed in to one book. If that sounds confusing then I've made my point clear. There's a murder, there's misguided, lost young adult children, and there's two outsiders who are just a bit too involved for things to be normal. Each character was so complex and their perspective so different, really making for a multifaceted mystery that had so many variations of the truth. Plus, three of the four are fairly unreliable, which we all know is my favorite. Mix in a bit of murder, a heaping pile of lies, and a woman who goes by many names and has a pile of tricks up her sleeve and you've got The Burial Society. It's an incredibly interesting plot and Nina Sadowsky reveals her writing skills with the extensive development given to the murder and aftermath, but the layout just doesn't work for the story.

The idea of The Burial Society is a great one, but the execution just didn't work out in my opinion. The changing perspective, changing tense, and alternating time frames really made for a lot more work as a reader than I find necessary in a novel. I love a good whodunit type of book, but if I can guess it right away and I'm still lead on a very long wild goose chase it no longer is entertaining. The most interesting story was Catherine's, we're drawn into it by the promise of more later on, but we're never given it. We're left to guess her true intentions and about her previous cases, left only with her ties to the Burrows' unfortunate incidents.

Overall, The Burial Society is a unique novel, one that'll tick all the boxes if you're looking for something new, but that doesn't make up for the excess details, very short chapters, and frequently changing POV. Though I read the book in one sitting, I wasn't left with any "AHA that was great" moment and no real understanding of the story Nina Sadowsky intended tell. I likely wouldn't read this again, nor would I recommend it to friends. Unfortunate miss for me.

I enjoyed this book. A spiral who did it tale that leaves you guessing. The story changes narrator's going between Natalie, Jake, and Catherine starting with the death of Natalie and Jake's mother Mallory to a time in Paris where bad luck and death seem to follow the pair of siblings. Unexpectedly Catherine gets pulled into the mix, helping the family to find their mother and then their father's killer.

The revealed killer was a surprise. I was hoping for more of an explanation of Catherine's Burial Society and perhaps more meat to Natalies character. Beyond that I found it an enjoyable read and look forward to seeing what the author comes up with next

The Burial Society is a psychological thriller that had me turning pages late into the night. The Chapters are short which makes for quick reading. Some of the chapters go into the past to fill us in the background of the characters. The story is told in alternating voices of Catherine, Frank, Jake and Natalie. This book is dark at times and contains secrets, lies, grief, mental illness, and murder. The plot twists will keep you guessing to the end. Thank you Nina Sadowsky, the publisher, and netgalley for an ARC of the book and this is my honest review.