First published 2026
Audrey Figg works as a park ranger at Devil's Den state park in the Ozarks, the same wilderness where her younger brother Benny disappeared fifteen years earlier during a family vacation. That loss divided her life into before and after. She has built her career around wilderness search and rescue, training new rangers and helping injured hikers while never stopping her search for answers about Benny's fate. When six-year-old Ivy vanishes on the park trails, Audrey recognizes disturbing parallels to her brother's disappearance. The evidence suggests Ivy was not simply lost but taken by something lurking in the deep woods. As Audrey expands her investigation, she becomes convinced that the same force claimed both children. Her pursuit of the truth forces buried memories to surface, including a terrible secret from the day Benny vanished that she has kept hidden from everyone. The closer she gets to solving both cases, the more she must confront what really happened that day and what price she will pay for closure.
Genres: suspense, mystery, horror, adult-fiction, thriller, psychological-thriller
Vibes: atmospheric, dark, emotionally-intense, haunting, psychological, suspenseful
Tropes: buried-secrets, parallel-mysteries, personal-investigation, unreliable-narrator
Setting: Devil's Den State Park, Ozarks
398 pages · Paperback · Little, Brown and Company
Content warnings: child-death, kidnapping