Heartwood (a Read with Jenna Pick) Hardcover

“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.