The Burning Library By Gilly MacMillan Source Purchased
Published by William Morrow on November 18, 2025
Rating:
On a frigid, windswept day in Scotland’s Western Hebrides, Eleanor Bruton’s body is discovered on the shore. To her family Eleanor was an ordinary middle-aged woman. She made flower arrangements and plumped kneeler cushions at church. Little did they know she was harboring a dark and all-consuming secret: a scrap of fraying embroidery that seems worthless at first glance.
For more than a century two rival organizations of women have gone to deadly lengths to secure the valuable artifact in the hopes of finding the original medieval manuscript from which it was torn: The Order of St Katherine, devoted to the belief that women must pull strings in the shadows to exercise control. And the Fellowship of the Larks, determined to amass as many overt positions of power for women as possible…so long as their methods of doing so never come to light.
When Dr Anya Brown garners international attention for her translation of the cryptic Folio 9, she is handpicked by Diana Cornish, a professor and high-ranking member of the Fellowship of the Larks, to join the exclusive Institute of Manuscript Studies in St Andrews. Meanwhile at Scotland Yard, Detective Clio Spicer begins a private investigation into the death of Eleanor Bruton.
As all of them grow further entangled in this ancient web, circumstances are spinning wildly out of control and their lives may be in grave danger.
I loved this premise so much, and was really excited when I started reading. It seemed like a very ‘me’ book, with its rival organizations hunting down an old manuscript. And it started strong!
But as the story went on, I found myself frustrated, because for all the talk about the two organizations, the Larks and the Katherines, and their work to improve the lives and status of women, I never actually saw what that meant. What exactly was the work they were doing? How had anything they’d done had any impact, beyond taking out their rivals in the other organization?
The story certainly had its thrilling moments, and I enjoyed reading from the perspective of the Scotland Yard detective the most, as she was trying to unravel the mystery from the outside. As a mystery, this was entertaining (especially if you like reading about old manuscripts and book binding, as I do), but I wanted more from it in the end.
It had such a strong beginning and the nature of the two different organizations intrigued me initially, but everything was centred on a manuscript whose meaning was never made clear, which I found incredibly frustrating, and the organizations were never portrayed as anything more than women with different beliefs attacking each other, which didn’t feel very empowering or interesting by the end.
