Burning Girl

About the Burning Girl series

The Burning Girl trilogy centers on Charlotte Rowe, who survived being set on fire by a serial killer as a child and emerged from the trauma with a form of enhanced strength and perception that has made her both a minor celebrity and a target ever since. Bone Music opens years later with Charlotte living under a new identity, hunting predatory men through encrypted online networks with a small team of allies -- until a case pulls her back into contact with the shadowy program that first identified and exploited people like her. The trilogy escalates from there into a wider conspiracy involving genetic experimentation, corrupt federal agencies, and other survivors whose trauma has been weaponized the same way hers was.

Christopher Rice built the series as an explicit hybrid of thriller mechanics and supernatural horror -- FBI agents, cartel violence, and procedural manhunts sit alongside genuinely uncanny elements inherited from his gothic-horror background, with Charlotte's abilities and the program behind them never fully rationalized into ordinary science. Reviewers frequently noted the series as a departure in pace and structure from his earlier standalone thrillers -- shorter chapters, cliffhanger-driven momentum -- while keeping the interest in trauma, found family, and institutional predation that runs through his other work.