**Content warnings are at the end, in the spoiler section. My memory’s not great, so they’re never comprehensive. I’d recommend searching other places for a fuller list.**
TL; W[on’t]R[read the review]: It’s a wild ride, but it has major representational issues.
Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Welcome to Chapel Croft. Five hundred years ago, eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake here. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself. Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping to make a fresh start and find some peace. Instead, Jack finds a town mired in secrecy and a strange welcome package: an old exorcism kit and a note quoting scripture. “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.” The more Jack and her daughter Flo get acquainted with the town and its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into their rifts, mysteries, and suspicions. And when Flo is troubled by strange sightings in the old chapel, it becomes apparent that there are ghosts here that refuse to be laid to rest. But uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village’s bloody past, and no one trusts an outsider.
[Note: This review is based on an eARC from NetGalley and Ballantine Books.]
This was my first CJ Tudor book, and I stayed up most of the night to finish it, so it clearly worked for me, on the whole. The ending was more satisfying than most thrillers I’ve read, though it did suffer from contemporary-thriller syndrome, where there practically have to be more twists than pages. Some of these twists were fun, some were ridiculous, and some were problematic, but there were definitely A LOT of them. I do wish that trend would chill…
Overall, the setting was interesting, and I loved the central character Jack, a woman vicar and single mom navigating a new rural parish. For the most part, this book jettisoned tedious conflict in favor of fast-moving reveals and the occasional well-placed flashback, so the pacing never lagged (hence I read it all in one night). There were some issues with problematic (read: racist) POC representation (and the overall lack thereof) and a larger issue with ableism in a few different ways, but I can say more about that in
SPOILER TERRITORY
Like in her previous novel The Other People, Tudor continues to have an issue with non-white characters in her novels. She seems to recognize the need to not have an England that’s solely populated by white folks, but she really, REALLY cannot manage to pull off well-rounded POC characters. Here, there are I think three Black characters: the kind head priest at Jack’s initial urban parish, and a lesbian couple at that urban parish who adopt their niece. The kind priest is murdered early in the novel, and, while his death is supposed to have brief emotional stakes for the reader as well as Jack herself, I feel like by this hellish year of 2021, we should’ve collectively moved past killing off the only POC character early in a thriller. (Horror movies have been making fun of the trope for decades now, my god.) And I say ONLY POC character, because the lesbian aunts are only shown via flashback, and they turn out to be abusive monsters who murder their niece out of a nonsensical blend of religious zealotry AND greed for child support payments. WHAT?? What’s worse, this murder (which happens at Jack’s London church) is what drives her out of the city and allows the “real” plot to happen. We focus on Jack’s trauma at witnessing this atrocity, which…feels icky. Also, in a novel where every other character is straight, having the ONLY queer characters be evil was fucked up.
Back in the world of all white folks, things get complicated. A bunch of people aren’t who they say they are, everyone’s past is coming back to haunt them, and literal ghosts of the titular “burning girls”–Protestant martyr children–are trying to protect Jack and her daughter Flo from the increasingly idiotic decisions they’re making. I enjoyed the hints of horror elements mixed in with this wild ride of exorcism-meets-murder-meets-serial-killers-meets-cover-ups, but it didn’t really spin into much. What you have at the beginning (glimpses of ghosts) is what you have at the end.
Speaking of the wild ride, though, this book throws everything it can think of at the wall, and apparently most of it stuck. This approach can generate a giddy feeling in the reader, though here it sometimes translated in a vertiginous, free-fall sensation that made me think the author herself wasn’t always in control of all of the reveals. Like a rollercoaster, it was fun, if somewhat queasy-making.
And two of the more persistent queasy-making elements of the novel were the way it handled (or mishandled) mental health and physical disability. Via flashback, we learn that Jack’s husband suffered from “depression,” which made him abusive and erratic. I’m no psychologist, but I do know that depression ALONE doesn’t cause either of those behaviors, and it’s actively harmful and stigmatizing (and really old-fashioned) to suggest it does. So I didn’t love that! In terms of developmental disability representation, Jack’s brother leaves something to be desired, as he’s a serial killer/avenging angel for his older sister, and his Michael-from-Halloween-like survival in the novel’s epilogue further feeds into ableist horror cliches about disability and monstrosity. But nothing really compares to the final-boss bad guy, Lucas, and the way he pretends to have a neurological movement disorder in order to garner sympathy and pretend vulnerability in front of his future victims. It’s…a mess. I ‘get’ that Lucas’s own ableism is meant to be another strike against him, but the result is still fake disability representation to make a point that, in the end, isn’t about disability.
As a final, positive note, I did enjoy seeing how much Tudor up-ended older YA romantic tropes for her teen protagonist: the “nice guy” boy might in fact be a lying scumbag murderer (and it IS a red flag when his favorite movie is The Usual Suspects), the mean girl might be even meaner than she seems, and the “not like other girls” girl who’s new to town might in fact be better off staying at home on the weekend. Basically, if you aspire to live out the plot of Heathers, be careful what you wish for.
Copaganda rating: Low (I read this a few months ago and can’t remember much cop participation, beyond their very general appearance at most of the crime scenes.)
Content warnings: sexual assault/rape, exorcism, graphic multilation and murder of a child, child death, murder, burns, domestic violence