The Burning Girls

A bucolic English pastoral setting makes an intriguing setup for what is pretty clever thriller. CJ Tudor has proven adapt at creating atmosphere in small village settings and this is no exception. Here we see a vicar moving to a country church after a scandal at her inner city one. It doesn't take long before secrets from the village begin to become apparent, and the plot cleverly weaves in a way that does keep you guessing till the end. Just the right amount of ambiguity is left to make things interesting too! I have thoroughly enjoyed all the CJ Tudor I have read and this is no exception.

I'm glad I enjoyed this book more than the last C.J. Tudor book I read but it still wasn't one of my favorites. I'm going to start off with what I liked:

If there is a religious theme in a thriller or horror book and that plays into the creepy or horrific elements, I'm almost always bound to enjoy it at least somewhat. I think this book handled that really well and it definitely added to the creepy atmosphere.

I also really enjoyed the mother-daughter relationship that was woven into the story. I think it added a lot to the story and was quite meaningful considering the mother was also a single mom. I'm not super big on relationships being explored within books unless they're romantic, but I really enjoyed the dynamic between the two characters.

Lastly the twist at the end shocked me a bit (most twists do because I never see anything coming lol) in a really good way. I really liked the end direction this book took and it bumped my rating uop half a star.

So moving onto the things I didn't enjoy, they're mostly the same types of problems I had with The Other People. C.J. Tudor loves to use multiple perspectives to add “suspense” and “intrigue” but I think it's mostly just confusing. Throughout this, i was really confused because there were so many storylines going on and the author tried to weave them into one story but ended up having a lot of loose ends. And I don't mind loose ends if they're purposefully left for the reader to contemplate or come up with their own conclusions but I can tell that wasn't what was done here. There were some left intentionally at the end but the other ones were just things brought up in the middle of the book, and just never touched on again. I think the main issue is that there is always too much going on and it's hard to keep track of and then all those storylines didn't even merge together into a conclusion.

That being said, I somehow ended up still being bored throughout a lot of this book and the same went for The Other People. I don't understand how a book can have so many storylines going on and still manage to do nothing, say nothing, and be boring for 50% or more of the book. I wish we focused on some of the other storylines more and just did 2-3 instead of the 7+ that was in here. The main ones that were focused on also weren't my favorite and not what I expected going into this book.

I did enjoy aspects of this book and I definitely don't look back on this book with negative feelings, but it was mostly just lackluster with a few things that saved it.

Thank you to Random House Publishing Group, C.J. Tudor, and NetGalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.