Bumpy Oak Books

**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**

Actual rating: 3.5

CJ Tudor returns with her newest thriller The Burning Girls. Jack is a vicar who has had recent tragedy in her chapel, so there is a chance for a fresh start with reassignment to a small village. The village has a strong religious history which involves a martyrdom that occurred wherein those who refused to renounce their religion were burned. Two of those girls are said to haunt the chapel still. Jack isn’t one to believe in ghosts until she starts seeing the burning girls herself. And with a small village, comes secrets upon secrets, some of which could be life-threatening.

I was waffling whether to round up or down my rating, but ultimately made the decision to round up because of one simple thing: CJ Tudor is a skilled writer. There were so many things happening. So many side stories. So many things that seemed unrelated. So many perspective shifts. CJ Tudor managed to tie everything up nice and neat at the end, and heck if that doesn’t earn a round up from me.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on personal preference, for most of the book it was just a lot. There was a very slow build. A gathering of all this information about all these different sub-plots. Until you know how they relate? It’s actually pretty draggy at some parts. For me, I would hope for a thriller to be page-turning all the way through and not just the last 10% or so.

Of course, being a thriller, talking about just about anything in the plot would be a spoiler, so I hesitate to get further into specifics about the things I might have chosen to exclude in order to pare down the focus of the book. There is a particular character who I felt really could have been excluded entirely without losing too terribly much from the story. Especially given as short as the book is, I would have liked a narrower focus.

Ultimately, I am left feeling grudgingly respectful about what CJ Tudor accomplished with The Burning Girls, and would definitely be interested in reading other works by Tudor in the future.