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.

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.