BookLife Review: Heartwood (Amity Gaige, author) by Carol O’Day
Fiction, missing person mystery-thriller, Appalachian Trail hiker, North Woods of Maine, female lead State Game warden, COVID nurse trail hiker, senior citizen armchair naturalist sleuth
Heartwood, by Amity Gage, is a missing person thriller set in the North Woods of Maine where a hiker goes missing along the most rigorous portion of the Appalachian Trail. Heartwood is multi-layered and well-paced. Gaige’s novel is a tri-fold narrative, alternating chapters and points of view between and among: Maine lead State Game Warden, Beverly, who is in charge of the search and rescue mission; Valerie Gillis, the 42 year-old nurse hiker who becomes lost on the trail; and Lena, a quirky seventy-six year-old avowed nature forager active in off-grid online community, who lives in a Connecticut retirement community.
Gaige’s novel tackles broad themes outside of the missing person mystery. As Valerie becomes lost and encounters an imbalanced young man in the woods, she confronts her own mortality and reflects in letters to her mother about the devastation and burn-out she experienced as a front-line nurse during the COVID epidemic. She hikes the Appalachian Trail to address that trauma and attempt to heal herself through nature. Beverly is a 57 year-old veteran Game Warden, and one of only a few women in a leadership role in her field in a masculine Maine community. She is focused, adept and accomplished in her field. While confident in her arena, Bev’s inability to locate Valerie in a matter of days rattles her to her core, causing her to question her future. Lena is people-adverse, divorced and estranged from her only daughter. Lena is the least fully drawn of the three primary characters. She appears to reside on the more acute area of the autism spectrum and is intensely focused on her preoccupation with foraging plants from nature to eat, eschews most relationships with other residents in the retirement community and relies heavily on a reddit forager community compatriot who is an extremist with a goal of going entirely off the grid.
The way these three characters interact and how their stories intersect is the crux of the novel, and will not be spoiled here. The reader is riveted by the timeline of the search, understanding that the chances of recovering a missing person alive in the woods more than a few days after they go missing. There is a palpable race underlying the search and the viability of Valerie’s survival ratchets up as the novel unfolds.
Heartwood is a great and riveting read. Its setting in the North Woods of Maine is fresh, the background details of the Appalachian Trail and its enthusiasts is fascinating, and the reveal of the role of Lena in the puzzle is perfectly timed. Readers in search of a missing person mystery may gobble up this Maine thriller in a single sitting.
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