Review: Thrilling ’Heartwood' begins when a woman vanishes in a forest

In Amity Gaige’s “Heartwood,” Lieutenant Beverly Miller oversees a search for Valerie Gillis, a 42-year-old Appalachian Trail hiker who fails to appear at a planned meeting with her husband in July 2022.

Lt. Bev, as she’s known, reflects on her region of Maine with a blend of poetic imagery, technical expertise and curt wisdom. “Any woodsman who says he’s never been lost in the woods is a liar,” she believes. “Up here, we tend to think of being lost as something you can be good at.”

Her respect for the natural world is matched by her awareness of the dangers within it. Just as Valerie does in letters to her mother, Lt. Bev oscillates between awe and fear. Gaige’s ability to introduce suspense and build it continuously, page after page, is astonishing.

Valerie’s disappearance and Lt. Bev’s increasingly obsessive search are enough to carry a novel, but Gaige fills “Heartwood” with other voices and characters, expanding the story far beyond the square miles under scrutiny. There are interview transcripts and messages to the tip line, including those from a psychic who suspects Valerie’s husband, Gregory, of involvement, as well as a hiker with insinuating disdain for Santo, Valerie’s closest male friend on the trail.

Gaige’s wit shimmers in these brief, effective, often discomfiting dispatches. The inclusion of the tip line hints at one of the novel’s concerns: the difference between a wish to help and the desire to be entertained, or how difficult it becomes, for some, to distinguish between the two.

This is clearest when Gaige introduces retiree Lena Kucharski, reading about Valerie’s case online from her retirement community. An introvert, autodidact and forager, Lena’s interest in the search becomes an obsession for her. Where Bev has facts, numbers and experience, Lena has conjecture and conspiracy.

“She would give her last breaths for this stranger,” Lena thinks. “What use are they to her?”

Lena’s devotion to the search is exacerbated by frequent online exchanges with a forager whose seemingly endless knowledge about nature is the foundation of their friendship.

At the center of Gaige’s tense, urgent tale is a quieter question, one without the markings of an adventure — without the knowing lingo of hikers or officials, without the tangled code of conspiratorial thinking, without meditations on why someone might undertake what’s known as a through-hike (a continuous hike along an established trail).

Lena asks the question of herself, through it applies throughout the novel: “What has it mattered, honestly, that she was so knowledgeable? What has she made of it?” Lt. Bev, looking at a map during the search, sees a “big brain of trails and grids.”

The word “seen” appears 50 times in “Heartwood” — even Valerie names a desire to be seen, rather than found — and the novel prods at the relationship between observation and knowledge. Gaige’s work is interested in information and expertise — not only their use, but also their limits, both of which she exposes in this complex, thrilling work.

Jackie Thomas-Kennedy’s debut novel, “The Other Wife,” is coming in July.

Heartwood

By: Amity Gaige.

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 309 pages.