Ready to enjoy an amazing read this 2020? Take a look at this great book…

Pine by Francine Toon

Genre: Psychological Thriller
Source: Random Things Tours
Publisher: DoubleDay
Amazon

About The Book

They are driving home from the search party when they see her.
The trees are coarse and tall in the winter light, standing like men. Lauren and her father Niall live alone in the Highlands, in a small village surrounded by pine forest. When a woman stumbles out onto 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, mysteries like these 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 local teenager Ann-Marie goes missing it’s no longer clear who she can trust.

My Thoughts

Since I saw the cover of this book I couldn’t resist to read it. It could seem simple but it makes you take a deeper look at the image and makes you want to read the plot and know more about this intriguing deer!
This had been an unsettling read; a disappearance in a small community in the Highlands surrounded by pines, making the villagers to look into each other’s life mixed with some folklore stories; yes, surprising and twisted Pine has been a delightful read!
Lauren, the main character, is trying to discover what happened to her mother while she adjusts at being a teenager in a small village… She will see both sides of humanity, the kind and the cruel, because her mother wasn’t a very loved woman. As you are well aware people are always afraid of the unknown and instead of trying to learn and discover something new they reject it and share as much hate as possible to it.
On the other side we will have Lauren’s father, Niall, he is lost and has his own dark secrets… But when another young girl disappears all his deepest fears will resurrect…
There are some drops of horror on this story, making the reader fear what will happen next, I always loved the mystical stories of faeries and kelpies and this was a great mixture of a contemporary story with some mythological creatures. The atmosphere of all the story is creepy and surrounded with fog, but don’t get me wrong, it makes the reader more invested in the book and eager to discover all the secrets.
Pine is a book that anyone will be enchanted to read, you simply have to let the story abduct you!

About The Author

Francine Toon grew up in Sutherland and Fife, Scotland. Her poetry, written as Francine Elena, has appeared in The Sunday Times, The Best British Poetry 2013 and 2015 anthologies (Salt) and Poetry London, among other places. Pine was longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She lives in London and works in publishing.