Well, whaddya know…? Marvel’s Jessica Jones star Krysten Ritter makes her novel writing debut this fall with the thriller Bonfire.
Ritter is best known as a fiery, puckish presence as an actor in memorable turns in series like Breaking Bad, Veronica Mars, Gilmore Girls, and Don’t Trust the B—- in Apartment 23. In 2015, she took on the role of wiseass, super-powered, alcoholic private investigator Jessica Jones in the eponymous Marvel series for Netflix. Ritter reprises the role in the newly-released team-up miniseries Marvel’s The Defenders. A second season of Jones is currently filming and expected to premiere in 2018.
She’s appeared in a variety of films, including Mona Lisa Smile, 27 Dresses, Confessions of a Shopaholic, She’s Out of My League, and Tim Burton’s Big Eyes. She’s formed her own production company to focus on projects for multidimensional female leads. Now, Ritter takes pen to paper for her first book.
She’s previously written and sold a television pilot titled Model Camp based on her experiences as a teen model. The pilot was not picked up to series.
The official synopsis for Bonfire from Penguin Random House:
From actress, producer, and writer, Krysten Ritter, a psychological suspense novel about a woman forced to confront her past in the wake of small-town corruption.
It has been ten years since Abby Williams left home and scrubbed away all visible evidence of her small town roots. Now working as an environmental lawyer in Chicago, she has a thriving career, a modern apartment, and her pick of meaningless one-night stands.
But when a new case takes her back home to Barrens, Indiana, the life Abby painstakingly created begins to crack. Tasked with investigating Optimal Plastics, the town’s most high-profile company and economic heart, Abby begins to find strange connections to Barrens’ biggest scandal from more than a decade ago involving the popular Kaycee Mitchell and her closest friends—just before Kaycee disappeared for good.
Abby knows the key to solving any case lies in the weak spots, the unanswered questions. But as she tries desperately to find out what really happened to Kaycee, troubling memories begin to resurface and she begins to doubt her own observations. And when she unearths an even more disturbing secret—a ritual called “The Game,” it will threaten the reputations, and lives, of the community and risk exposing a darkness that may consume her.
With tantalizing twists, slow-burning suspense, and a remote, rural town of just five claustrophobic miles, Bonfire is a dark exploration of what happens when your past and present collide.
The book hits streets on November 7th.