Heartwood
“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 novel exploring life, love, and relationships through the intertwined stories of ...
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.
S
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.
Heartwood follows Valerie Gillis who is an experienced hiker that disappears just 200 miles from completing the Appalachian Trail. Her disappearance launches a massive search through the Maine wilderness led by game warden Beverly Miller. Hundreds of miles away, 76-year-old Lena Kucharski becomes fascinated by the case from her retirement community and begins investigating from her computer. The novel moves between these women as the search for Valerie slowly reveals what happened after she vanished from the trail.
Amity Gaige builds the book around isolation, motherhood, survival, and the different ways people become lost. I could appreciate what she was trying to explore, but I spent most of the book feeling detached from both the characters and their emotional journeys. Valerie’s decision to hike the Appalachian Trail as a form of healing never resonated with m. The repeated focus on finding yourself through an extended wilderness trek felt incredibly distant from my own understanding of healing. Taking months away from normal responsibilities to hike thousands of miles on a trail feels like an experience available to only privileged groups of people.
The characters made my boredom with the setting harder to overcome. Valerie follows a strange man into the woods. Her friend leaves her alone on the trail after receiving a phone call. Lena becomes deeply involved in a missing person investigation despite having no connection to Valerie. Daniel is disturbing for obvious reasons. Beverly’s investigation provides the most practical perspective, but I never became particularly attached to her either. I kept waiting for someone to give me a foothold and nobody did.
Lena's discovery of Valerie’s bandana in a photograph becomes the tiny clue that finally pushes the investigation in the right direction. That felt believable because missing person cases often seem to turn on an easily overlooked detail that suddenly gives investigators somewhere new to look. I liked seeing her observations matter after so much searching had produced little progress.
The mother and daughter relationships receive a lot of attention in the story. Valerie writes to her mother, Beverly wrestles with her relationship with her mother, and Lena carries the pain of estrangement from her daughter. I understood what the book wanted to say about mothers, daughters, identity, and loss without feeling particularly moved by any of it.
Heartwood has an unusual combination of wilderness survival, literary fiction, and missing person suspense. Pick this up if you are fascinated by long distance hiking, search and rescue operations, armchair investigations, or reflective stories about motherhood. I spent most of my time waiting for the search to become gripping. I was very ready to leave the Appalachian Trail behind by the final page.
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