THE COUNTING GAME

When 13-year-old Saoirse Kellough vanishes while playing a counting game in the woods with her little brother, Jack, the insular Irish village of Drumsuin is thrown into a state of disarray and suspicion.

The year is 1995 and Saoirse is not the first girl to go missing in the woods surrounding Drumsuin—merely the latest in a string of unsolved disappearances that have haunted townsfolk for some time. According to Jack, at the time of Saoirse’s disappearance they were playing a counting game their mother taught them to ward off evil—making him the only witness to what happened that night. As it becomes increasingly clear that Jack is struggling to communicate what he saw, often refusing to speak and instead expressing himself through dark imagery in his artwork, local authorities call on Freya Hemmings, a psychotherapist still reeling from the death of her own young daughter, to help get to the bottom of the night’s events. Freya specializes in investigating missing children and as she spends more time with a troubled Jack and the remaining Kellough family members, she becomes convinced there’s much more than meets the eye to Drumsuin and its residents, all of whom seem to harbor dark secrets and hidden pasts. While Freya’s good-heartedness as a psychotherapist and Jack’s innocence and voice—or lack thereof—ring true, the book’s glacial pace dampens the suspense as well as the family drama that carries the plot forward.

The slow pace of this psychological thriller drags it down.