Heartwood (A Read with Jenna Pick): A Novel
“Heartwood will keep you guessing the whole way through. I didn't want it to end.” —Liz Moore
“The best thriller of 2025.” —The Boston Globe * “Genius.” —The Washington Post
“A literary thriller of the highest order” (Elin Hilderbrand, New York Times bestselling author of The Perfect Couple), Heartwood takes you on a gripping journey as a search and rescue team race against time after a woman mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail.
In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.
At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.
Heartwood is a “gem of a thousand facets—suspenseful, transporting, tender, and ultimately soul-mending,” (Megan Majumdar, New York Times bestselling author of A Burning) that tells the story of a lost hiker’s odyssey and is a moving rendering of each character’s interior journey. The mystery inspires larger questions about the many ways in which we get lost, and how we are found. At its core, Heartwood is an “unputdownable” (Real Simple) and redemptive novel, written with both enormous literary ambition and love.
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Readers say *Heartwood* is a beautifully written wilderness suspense exploring life, love, and relationships through Valerie’s Appalachian Trail disap...
Heartwood is a wilderness suspense novel that will make you think about life, love, and relationships. Valerie Gillis, a forty-two-year-old nurse, is hiking the Appalachian Trail and vanishes almost 200 miles from her final goal. She has her journal with her and writes letters to her mother while she waits for help. Beverly is the Maine State Game Warden in charge of finding Valerie. She is tough as nails and will not give up the search until Valerie is found. Another character central to the story is Lena, a seventy-six-year-old bird watcher who lives in a retirement community in Connecticut. Lena becomes an unlikely internet sleuth for Valerie. Will they find Valerie in time?
The heart of this story is the mother-daughter relationship. The author weaves the stories in and out beautifully. I love the letters Valerie wrote to her mother. I can’t say more without giving anything away. Sometimes the pace lagged a little for me and I wished it had been a little faster. I appreciated the detail on trails, hiking, and search and rescue procedures. I loved the idea behind the name Heartwood. This is a special book and I look forward to reading more from this author. Thank you to Simon & Schuster for providing this book for review consideration via Net Galley. All opinions are my own.
The heart of this story is the mother-daughter relationship. The author weaves the stories in and out beautifully. I love the letters Valerie wrote to her mother. I can’t say more without giving anything away. Sometimes the pace lagged a little for me and I wished it had been a little faster. I appreciated the detail on trails, hiking, and search and rescue procedures. I loved the idea behind the name Heartwood. This is a special book and I look forward to reading more from this author. Thank you to Simon & Schuster for providing this book for review consideration via Net Galley. All opinions are my own.
Sparrow
Oh my gods. The ending of this book just gutted me. But in a good cathartic way. This is about a woman who gets lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail. But it’s about so much more. The story is told from several perspectives and that back and forth gives it such a propulsive energy. The descriptions of the trail, the hikers, the environs, the search, the searchers, the family, shows how much more complicated the Appalachian Trail actually is and how unprepared most of us are to be out in raw nature.
Oh my gods. The ending of this book just gutted me. But in a good cathartic way. This is about a woman who gets lost while hiking the Appalachian Trail. But it’s about so much more. The story is told from several perspectives and that back and forth gives it such a propulsive energy. The descriptions of the trail, the hikers, the environs, the search, the searchers, the family, shows how much more complicated the Appalachian Trail actually is and how unprepared most of us are to be out in raw nature.
This was one of the selections for the 2026 GR’s Star Selections challenge. When I was reviewing all the 2026 GR challenges, I was kind of looking for challenge selections that coincided with some of my own 2026 challenges. However, when I saw this one, I remembered some of the reviews I’ve read about it and wondered why I never added it to my own to-read list because it sounded like a really good story about the search and rescue of a lost hiker on the Appalachian Trail.
The book summary basically just introduces the three storylines of the lost hiker, Valerie, the local Game Warden, Beverly, and an elderly woman, Lena, who lives in a retirement community. The book summary calls Lena a bird watcher, but she’s actually a forager of plants and herbs. While Lena loved the outdoors and did have a knowledge of birds, it seems weird that the publishers chose to call her a bird watcher and not mention her foraging passion, especially since it was her foraging that led her to the search for Valerie.
Anyway, the story flips back and forth between the three ladies and their connections to each other and the search for Valerie. While the search for Valerie is the primary focus of the storylines, there is an underlying storyline of the mother-daughter relationships for each of these women; for Valerie and Beverly it is the complicated relationship with their mothers, and for Lena it is the estranged relationship with her daughter. I’ve always had mixed feelings about stories concentrated on mother-daughter relationships, which, I’m sure, are a result of my own complicated mother-daughter relationship. Whatever, I will say that I do like seeing how the characters come to some resolution about their feelings, whatever they may be, that too reminds me of my own resolutions.
The character development for Valerie, Beverly and Lena was well done along with a couple of other characters, like Santo, one of Valerie’s trail buddies, who was hilarious and added value to every scene he was in. There was also TerribleSilence, one of Lena’s internet foraging friends who became a vital part of the story. The pacing was steady and never seemed to drag, at least not for me. I was engrossed from the moment I started it. The storyline was very interesting, once again, at least to me it was. I was oddly fascinated by Valerie’s journal entries of devotion and fascination to her mother and Beverly’s elusion and evasion of her mother. The writing was well done with some really emotional passages of the search and Valerie’s state of mind. The ending was a tear-jerker in so many ways, at least for me it was, but here and now is not the place to unpack all that crap. GR has this as a mystery/thriller, mystery, yes, thriller, not so much. I would definitely call this a domestic drama, simply because of all the family drama. I’m looking at an overall rating of 4.4 that I will be rounding down to a 4star review.
The book summary basically just introduces the three storylines of the lost hiker, Valerie, the local Game Warden, Beverly, and an elderly woman, Lena, who lives in a retirement community. The book summary calls Lena a bird watcher, but she’s actually a forager of plants and herbs. While Lena loved the outdoors and did have a knowledge of birds, it seems weird that the publishers chose to call her a bird watcher and not mention her foraging passion, especially since it was her foraging that led her to the search for Valerie.
Anyway, the story flips back and forth between the three ladies and their connections to each other and the search for Valerie. While the search for Valerie is the primary focus of the storylines, there is an underlying storyline of the mother-daughter relationships for each of these women; for Valerie and Beverly it is the complicated relationship with their mothers, and for Lena it is the estranged relationship with her daughter. I’ve always had mixed feelings about stories concentrated on mother-daughter relationships, which, I’m sure, are a result of my own complicated mother-daughter relationship. Whatever, I will say that I do like seeing how the characters come to some resolution about their feelings, whatever they may be, that too reminds me of my own resolutions.
The character development for Valerie, Beverly and Lena was well done along with a couple of other characters, like Santo, one of Valerie’s trail buddies, who was hilarious and added value to every scene he was in. There was also TerribleSilence, one of Lena’s internet foraging friends who became a vital part of the story. The pacing was steady and never seemed to drag, at least not for me. I was engrossed from the moment I started it. The storyline was very interesting, once again, at least to me it was. I was oddly fascinated by Valerie’s journal entries of devotion and fascination to her mother and Beverly’s elusion and evasion of her mother. The writing was well done with some really emotional passages of the search and Valerie’s state of mind. The ending was a tear-jerker in so many ways, at least for me it was, but here and now is not the place to unpack all that crap. GR has this as a mystery/thriller, mystery, yes, thriller, not so much. I would definitely call this a domestic drama, simply because of all the family drama. I’m looking at an overall rating of 4.4 that I will be rounding down to a 4star review.
I really enjoyed this book, for the first 1/3… I hated how the big fat intimidating man is 260, excuses my language but fuck off 260! Stop insisting he’s this big fat scary man at 260, that he shouldn’t be hiking at 260, that his calorie intake must be as huge as he is! 260 is really not that huge! Fat shaming aside I liked some of the characters points of view and was fine with their chapters but got lost is the murk of others. I hate read the rest of the book to finish it…. Maybe I missed somthing but fat shaming, mental health shaming, just bad plot movement…. Ehhhhh