by Amity Gaige
First published 2025
Valerie Gillis disappears in the Maine wilderness, two hundred miles short of completing the Appalachian Trail. The forty-two-year-old hiker writes fragmented, poetic letters to her mother as she fights to survive alone in the woods. Beverly, a Maine State Game Warden, leads the ground search with her rescue team. From a Connecticut retirement community, seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher Lena joins the hunt as an armchair detective. As the investigation unfolds across these three perspectives, clues suggest Valerie's disappearance might be deliberate rather than accidental. The search becomes increasingly desperate while Valerie struggles against the elements and her own fading hope. The mystery deepens as Beverly and Lena piece together fragments of evidence, racing to find Valerie before time runs out in the unforgiving Maine backcountry.
Genres: drama, suspense, mystery, contemporary, adult-fiction, thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, introspective, lyrical, suspenseful, thought-provoking
Tropes: found-family, multiple-narrators, mystery-investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Maine, Appalachian Trail, Connecticut
Period: contemporary
320 pages · Paperback · Simon & Schuster
Content warnings: death, mental-illness