Gilly MacMillan is known for her psychological, twisty thrillers, often family-focused domestic noir, which reach back into their characters’ past. So, The Burning Library is something of a departure for her, striding firmly into Dan Brown ancient-truths-and-secret-societies territory, but it’s much more fun than the adventures of Brown’s somewhat po-faced symbologist.
Protagonist Dr Anya Brown (see what she did there) is a star Oxford PhD student, who translates a formerly indecipherable text and is then offered a dream job at the Institute of Manuscript Studies at St Andrews. This includes a job for her partner, Sid, an IT specialist and a desirable coastal cottage for them to live in. If it all looks too good to be true, it probably is, especially in thriller fiction of this kind.
For Anya is being captured by a secret society, the Fellowship of the Larks (‘What larks!’) the exclusively female members of which seek to advance the rights and power of women, supporting and facilitating their careers. The Larks want to use Anya’s skills to decipher precious and ancient manuscripts. Manuscripts feature heavily in The Burning Library, one leading to another and ultimately to the Book of Wonders, a tome which will bestow great power on women (though exactly how, we are not told). Naturally, the Larks are not the only secret society searching for the Book. Their deadly rivals are members of the Order of St Katherine who take an opposite approach, being traditional wives and mothers who work through their, often unknowing, menfolk to exercise covert power. This ‘power behind the throne’ approach is recognisable from history when there was no other option available to women, but seems decidedly creepy now, especially given the regularity with which they are prepared to murder their men. Macmillan creates a faultline between the two approaches to female power and sets them in opposition to each other. Both societies are appropriately ruthless and vicious.
The narrative shifts between different points of view, from Anya and DC Clio Spicer, of Scotland Yard’s Art & Antiques Squad, to Sid and to members of the Larks and Kats, as they are styled. Bodies mount up as Anya and Sid realise that Anya’s dream posting is a poisoned chalice. (Though, rest assured, there is no mention of the Holy Grail.)
As someone whose latest books reference the evolving role of women, post-WWII, it was refreshing and fun to read a female-focused contemporary adventure-thriller like this one. Even the Private Investigator hired to trace a missing woman who worked at the Institute is female. And it’s not Anya’s eidetic memory that is the supreme skill involved, although that comes in handy on more than one occasion, rather it is… sewing. Pieces of beautiful fifteenth century embroidery form the first clue, its pattern a code. A poem stitched into a curtain is the second. Later in the tale, a padded bra is opened up and used as a hiding place, tiny stitches sewing it back up again and it takes a woman detective to notice the little hotel sewing kit in the handbag of the corpse has been used, the cotton the colour of said bra.
The Burning Library is good fun, full of puzzles, riddles and hidden messages and it is fitting that the first of the ‘missing manuscripts’ is itself a glossary. That said, as the trail leads our heroes to the mediaeval city of Verona, assassins from both Larks and Kats on their tail, the tension ramps up and we move towards a perilous and gripping climax worthy of any male dominated thriller.
The Burning Library by Gilly MacMillan is available now from Baskerville.

Reviewer: Julie Anderson, Author of Death in the Afternoon.