Burn After Reading

A year ago, former professional cyclist Jack Smyth lost his wife in a fire at their home. But the nation’s sympathy turned to anger when it emerged that she had died before the fire started, in a violent attack. Although Jack has never been charged in connection to her death, a suffocating cloud of suspicion hangs over him and he’s become convinced that the only way out is to tell his side of the story.

When Emily Joyce is offered the gig as his ghostwriter, her main motivation for saying yes is the payday. She flies out to the eerie, empty, master-planned town of Sanctuary, Florida, to hole up with Jack for a week, getting his story down.

But the story Jack tells isn’t the one she expected, and soon Emily is thrown into a dangerous plot twist that she may not be able to write her way out of …

I love Catherine Ryan Howard’s books, and the premise of this grabbed my attention right away. I love stories about writing and reading and ghostwriting, and I thought this was another great mystery from this author! While reading, I could not help but think of the OJ Simpson If I Did It book, and there was a very informative author’s note at the end that discussed this as the inspiration for this story.

This is an auto-buy author for me, and as I expected, I really enjoyed this book, although I do feel like the mystery element was weaker than in her previous books that I’ve enjoyed. But I loved the setting, which gave me ghost-town vibes even though it was a newly built community. Emily is far from home, isolated, and increasingly unsure about who can be trusted.

While this isn’t my favourite Catherine Ryan Howard book, it was a tense, gripping read that I inhaled!