Bonfire

Starred review from September 4, 2017
Actress Ritter (Marvel’s Jessica Jones) makes a triumphant fiction debut with this pulse-pounding thriller featuring a sympathetic, broken lead character. Ten years after leaving her hometown of Barrens, Ind., Chicago attorney Abby Williams returns as part of a legal team considering civil litigation against Optimal Plastics, a corporation whose chemicals may have caused illness and damaged crops. The professional challenge is daunting: Optimal has bought off much of the town, including a prosecutor who began a case against the company, until it swelled his campaign coffers for political office. Abby finds links to a case from more than a decade earlier, the disappearance of popular Kaycee Mitchell. On the personal side, Abby is unable to escape the grip of the past: a claque of mean girls relentlessly bullied her during high school, and her one surviving relative is her abusive father, who’s declining mentally and physically. Abby’s noirish worldview (she divides humanity into “the people of the world who squeeze and the ones who suffocate”) is pitch-perfect, and Ritter effectively uses Abby’s present-tense narration to create immediacy. Agent: Stephen Barbara, Inkwell Management.

September 1, 2017
A young environmental lawyer returns to her small Indiana hometown to investigate pollution by a regional plastics giant--but settling old scores and healing old wounds weigh heavily on her mind.Abby Williams left the aptly named Barrens, Indiana, for Chicago as soon as she turned 18 and never looked back, trading the equivalent of a one-horse town that prizes football and rifles for a sleek apartment and a nameless parade of men she doesn't have to love. Now an attorney with the Center for Environmental Advocacy Work, she's headed back to the last place she ever wanted to go, but this time with a mission: take down Optimal Plastics, the corporate giant that's allegedly polluting the town's water supply. Along with an eager team of millennials, Abby returns to Barrens to find it both unchanged and almost unrecognizable: the high school girls who used to torment her have grown up and one is even the school's vice principal, but the town's allegiance to Optimal is still strong. In Abby's day, there was a spate of unexplained illnesses, led by Abby's former best friend, and later biggest foe, Kaycee Mitchell, who displayed bizarre signs akin to either mass hysteria or perhaps environmental poisoning. When Kaycee ran away after high school, the other girls confessed it was a hoax. Now Abby's not so sure, as she digs deeper into Optimal's deep ties to the town, some benign and some much more malignant, all while wrestling with her own, somewhat predictable, demons that Ritter (best known for her television role on Netflix's Jessica Jones) tries admirably to spice up. A fast-paced thriller that doesn't reinvent the wheel but introduces a tough female lead who's easy to root for.

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January 22, 2018
Actress Ritter’s first novel is a smartly crafted thriller in which dedicated environmental lawyer Abby Williams travels from Chicago to her hometown of Barrens, Ind., as part of a team investigating the environmental harm of Optimal Plastics, the town’s main employer. Abby is searching for evidence of Optimal’s unhealthy practices and answers to questions from her past, primarily what happened to her best frenemy from high school, Kaycee Mitchell, who went missing just after graduation a decade ago. Reader Vacker’s rendition of a strong-willed but otherwise-fragile young woman trying to do her job while struggling with memories from a painful past is convincing. Just as impressive is her handling of other characters past and present, including snarky mean girls from Abby’s high school days, the sullen present-day townsfolk, and her once cold and impersonal father now in the throes of Alzheimer disease. Vacker is especially effective in the novel’s most dramatic and suspenseful chapter, when Abby faces what seems like certain death at the hands of a killer. The result is a stirring audiobook. A Crown Archetype hardcover.