The Counting Game: A Novel

Into the woods.
Count to ten.
Only one of us comes home again.

When a teenager disappears from her small Irish town and a therapist is brought in to break the silence of the only witness, old wounds are opened in a search that becomes a race against time-perfect for fans of God of the Woods and The Witch Elm.

Southwest Ireland, 1995: Two children go into the woods. Only one comes out.

When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in the forest, rumored by locals to be haunted, and the only witness-her troubled younger brother, Jack-refuses to speak. Saoirse went missing when they were playing the Counting Game, a ritual believed to ward off evil, and Jack has sworn to protect the forest's secrets.

Freya Hemmings, a psychotherapist still healing from a loss of her own, is brought in to help investigators break Jack's silence. As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, the search threatens to unravel a family facing the unthinkable. Everyone is a suspect, and the closer Freya and Jack become, the more danger they find themselves in.

Haunting and emotional, The Counting Game is a suspenseful debut from an unmissable new voice in crime fiction.