Heartwood

Valerie Gillis, a forty-two-year-old nurse known on the trail as Sparrow, decides in July 2022 to hike the Appalachian Trail alone and vanishes in the Maine woods, 200 miles from her destination. Amity Gaige's thriller moves among three voices. Valerie, lost in the wilderness, writes letters to her mother. Lieutenant Beverly Miller, the first woman to lead the Maine Warden Service, runs the search on the ground. From a retirement community in Connecticut, Lena, a birdwatcher of seventy-six, takes up the case with an online friend. Transcripts of tip-line messages and interviews add to the puzzle. Gaige was inspired by the case of Geraldine Largay, and she hiked parts of the trail in New York and Maine while researching it.

It appeared on Jenna Bush Hager's Read With Jenna book club list on the Today Show.