THE BURN BEAST

When the going gets tough, so do the kids.

Pira Morand is used to being uprooted: “Fifteen towns in thirteen years, to be precise.” Her moms, private detectives who take on “unusual mysteries,” are often on the road, but a stint in Eyrewood to investigate a disappearance feels foreboding. For starters, Eyrewood abuts a former logging area known colloquially as “the slash,” which was destroyed by a raging fire that also razed the town 30 years ago. Since then, there’s been no regrowth—it’s as if the fire just happened—and it’s been impossible to light so much as a birthday candle in Eyrewood. There are also local legends about burnlings, fire demons that “devour unwary trespassers in the woods.” As her moms become more immersed in their PI investigations, Pira, who’s cued white, befriends the Firefighters, a group of local kids who are determined to battle the burnlings and take back the forest. But Pira and her friends soon find that there’s more to the stories and the disappearances than they ever imagined. Averling’s writing is tense and evocative while delivering a breathless sense of fun, like a midnight game of Ghost in the Graveyard. The racially diverse Firefighters are a ragtag team of emboldened moppets armed with catapults, slingshots, knives, and an axe named Mabel. An undercurrent of climate anxiety runs through the book, adding depth to an otherwise fantastical horror story.

A quintessential thriller that burns like wildfire.