‘The Burning Girls’ by C. J. Tudor – Highly Recommended

Five hundred years ago: eight martyrs were burnt to death.
Thirty years ago: two teenagers vanished without trace.
Two months ago: the vicar committed suicide.

Welcome to Chapel Croft.

For Rev Jack Brooks and teenage daughter Flo it’s supposed to be a fresh start. New job, new home. But, as Jack knows, the past isn’t easily forgotten. And in a close-knit community where the residents seem as proud as they are haunted by Chapel Croft’s history, Jack must tread carefully. Ancient superstitions as well as a mistrust of outsiders will be hard to overcome.

Yet right away Jack has more frightening concerns.
Why is Flo plagued by visions of burning girls?
Who’s sending them sinister, threatening messages?
And why did no one mention that the last vicar killed himself?

Chapel Croft’s secrets lie deep and dark as the tomb. Jack wouldn’t touch them if not for Flo—anything to protect Flo. But the past is catching up with Chapel Croft—and with Jack. For old ghosts with scores to settle will never rest….

It seems to me that each C. J. Tudor book that I read gets better than the last, which is quite an achievement given how good her first book, The Chalk Man was. The next one that I read, The Taking Of Annie Thorne was darker and grimmer and had a powerhouse of an ending filled with surprises that made sense.

I think The Burning Girls tops both of them. It’s grim and violent and filled with guilty secrets and deceptions. The start lulled me into thinking that I was reading another story about a haunting in an English village which will threaten the newcomers, the vicar and her teenage daughter, and end with a dramatic confrontation between good and evil. It soon became clear anything familiar about this story was probably a distraction. Yes, there was a haunting going on and yes, the vicar and her daughter were in danger but there was a lot more going on and most of it was twisted and violent.

The plot is intricate and strong. There are lots of twists that made me reassess what I knew right up to the end but they weren’t tricks played on the reader, they were more like confirmations of suspicions that had been growing for a while but which turned out to be even worse than expected. The path of the various bad actors in this book, past and present, is beautifully choreographed to maintain tension, build characterisation and push the reader forward inexorably.

Even so, the plot is not the strongest feature of the book. What I enjoyed most was the way the characters of the vicar and her daughter were drawn. Each of them seemed real to me and the relationship between them was one of the most believable middle-aged single-mom to teenage daughter I’ve read.

I liked that the daughter was her own person. She wasn’t just a plot device labelled “Vicar’s Vulnerable Daughter’, she had her own view on the world and the people around her, including her mother.

The vicar was a wonderful creation. That she was unconventional, stubborn and a magnet for trouble was immediately clear in her encounter with her Bishop who is banishing her to the wilderness for attracting bad publicity. That she caused waves in the village she’d been reluctantly assigned to seemed unsurprising, especially considering the bluster and bullying she encounters. Even at that point though, I knew there was more to the vicar’s story, something about her and her reactions that was off, that I wasn’t understanding. Finding out what that was delivered most of the energy of the book. When I finally understood what I was seeing, I was even more impressed with the vicar than when I first met her in the Bishop’s office.

I found myself twisting my days to find more time to spend listening to The Burning Girls. I was completely absorbed in it and ended up listening late into the night to know how the book would end.

I recommend the audiobook version. It has two narrators, Gemma Whelan delivers most of the story and Richard Armitage narrates the parts of the story giving a first-person account from an unknown, violent man on a quest that is leading him toward the Vicar’s village. Both of them do an excellent job. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.