Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Nothing burns as bright as the truth.
Bonfire
What you need to know before your trail
It has been ten years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all 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 economic heart, she begins to find strange connections to a decade-old scandal involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her friends―just before Kaycee disappeared for good.
But as Abby tries desperately to find out what happened to Kaycee, troubling memories begin to resurface and she begins to doubt her own observations. And when she unearths an even more disturbing secret, her search threatens the reputations, and lives, of the community and risks exposing a darkness that may consume her.
Travel Guide
Barrens, Indiana
The Harrison County “Barrens” got their name due to the lack of timber coverage.
The land here is pretty empty – grass and small bushes and prairie only landscape. There was a shortage of people who lived there first of all as there was little timber and not enough to build homes and then have fires!
An ideal place therefore for someone to return home and have to face up to their past. Abby returns to Barrens in an official role – investigating Optimal Plastics, a company which is heralded as being the saviour of the town. Many say it saved Barrens from financial and social devastation with jobs and prosperity not to mention a purpose for the residents. Now, however, it’s dogged by rumours of corruption, and blamed for contaminating the water supply amongst other things.
A town where you left, now has you as an outsider. And the community as remote and claustrophobic as this one soon closes ranks.
Streetview Maps
A) USA - Indiana - Barrens
B) USA - Indiana - Palmyra
Booktrailer Review
Susan: @thebooktrailer
This is a really richly evoked and tightly plotted novel with some very dark corners and hidden secrets. A women returns home, reluctantly, in her official role as investigator. When she looks into the very company credited with saving the town from extinction, people start to turn on her, yet the same company are suspected of poisoning the water supply.
This is a town with secrets and secrets from the past, things which haunt the present and hidden anger too. There is an interesting cast of characters in this town, a black gay lawyer, the head of the local school who was a very different character in the past, and let’s not forget Abby’s role in all of this…
Abby is a very interesting character who developed well over the course of the book. Her return to a town which had spat her out is a gritty premise and one explored in all uncomfortable and tantalising detail. Best of all is the town they call Barren. Barren by name and barren by nature. A remote, claustrophobic place which is aptly suited to the themes of the story.
Past and present blend seamlessly – you can smell the bonfire throughout. The flames consume everything in its path but you can’t take your eyes of the destruction.
Booktrail Boarding Pass: Bonfire
Destination: Barrens, Indiana Author/Guide: Krysten Ritter Departure Time: 2000s
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