Pine Author:Francine Toon Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out on to the road one Halloween night, Niall drives her back to their house in his pickup. In the morning, she's gone. — In a community where daughters rebel, men quietly rage, and drinking is a means of forgetting, my... more »steries like this are not out of the ordinary. The trapper found hanging with the dead animals for two weeks. Locked doors and stone circles. The disappearance of Lauren's mother a decade ago.
Lauren looks for answers in her tarot cards, hoping she might one day be able to read her father's turbulent mind. Neighbours know more than they let on, but when a local teenager goes missing it's no longer clear who she can trust.
In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the world, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with a pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times. « less