"This twisty psychological thriller teems with the tension of an unsolved murder and family secrets."
Fast-paced and propulsive, Sophie McKenzie’s Burn This blazes with the chilling mystery of a decades-old child murder, family drama and shocking secrets, with well-placed clues and cunningly planted red herrings leading both the protagonist and readers down a succession of unexpected paths.
The premise of Burn This is in-your-face compelling. In the Prologue, protagonist Bella confesses that she’s long been wracked by guilt around the murder of her childhood best friend, who was killed in the woods at the age of ten: “I never cried. I couldn’t let myself feel the pain of Vicky’s loss. Because if I’d felt that pain, I’d have had to let in the guilt too. It should have been me fetching that ball. It should have been me.” Thirty years later, Bella returns to her childhood home with her nine-year-old daughter. Her mum is dead, her dad is in a care home with dementia, and she’s struggling in the aftermath of redundancy and divorce: “The truth is that I’m broke and desperate, with nowhere else to go.”
Into this, Bella discovers her mother’s diary. “BURN THIS”, it reads, so of course Bella is driven to read every last word, and compelled to try to discover who killed Vicky when it seems her mum witnessed the murder, and most people, including the police, brush off her discovery: “I want to find out the truth. Find out who killed my friend… if the police aren’t going to investigate Vicky’s murder any further, then I’m going to look into it myself.”
As Bella starts to unearth dark secrets, it becomes blatantly clear the murderer is still alive, and in the area, and so Burn This builds to a gripping crescendo, with frissons of romance further fanning the novel’s flames.
