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“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.”

Author: Darcy Coates

Darcy Coates can write. She can also scare you to the brink of paranoia and beyond. Hunted is one of her best, eeriest, and most probable reads to date. It’s certainly not the book you should take with you on a remote camping trip!

It all begins when Eileen Hershberger goes missing, hiking through Ashlough Forest. Eileen’s friends and family beg the police to investigate, but after a routine search, they say there is nothing more they can do. After all, Ashlough Forest is huge, with many dense trails, and there is no guarantee that Eileen even stayed on them.

When Eileen’s camera is found by a fisherman, the family has renewed hope, only to once again be pushed aside by the police, despite what the eerie photos reveal. Eileen’s brother, Chris, and his three friends (Flint, Hailey, and Anna) decide to take matters into their own hands. Armed with enough thread to lead them back along the path that they came, they strike into the forest, searching for their friend.

Meanwhile, Detective Carla Delago is haunted by the case and starts to quietly dig deeper. What she finds is a history of missing hikers, pointing to a serial killer. Can she convince the rest of the force in time to do anything for Eileen or to stop the killer before he strikes again?

Hunted is a deeply disturbing, edge-of-your-seat read. It is one of the few books I will have to buy a print copy of, because I will read it again, despite knowing the outcome. The atmosphere is tense, and Coates combines just the right amount of smarts (the friends do arrive in the forest somewhat prepared) with the right amount of tragedy, happenstance, panic, and clever villains. This leads to a Goldilocks moment where everything is just right. And by that, I mean drenched in viscera and complicated psychological schemes.

Image by Jakub Zeman from Pixabay

We feel the dripping, verdant forest; the scampering, biting ants; the rough edges of the molding bark; the bright, fragile red line of the thread that leads back to redemption; and the pumping, metallic blood that soaks into the loam. Each of the characters feel so real, and while most of the story is focused on their terror and loyalty, combined with their desire to save those who are lost, we also get sneak peeks into their interior worlds, what makes them tick, how they interact, how each is more complex than the other can possibly know. It’s a perfect formula, and when the killer starts picking them off, it’s both scary and heartbreaking. We root for them to survive, just as we know that this story will not end without more loss.

As the friends struggle through the increasingly creepy forest, festooned with warnings carved onto the trees and the evidence of previous carnage, a police procedural cranks up in the background. Carla, recovering from her own grief, is slowly starting to realize the pattern that is emerging and mobilizing forces to do something about it. Of course, the danger may be far closer to her than she even realizes.

In the end, we have moments of desperation and loss, escape and fevered fear, revelations and confrontations, and an explanation that ties everything together into the bloody beating heart of an unrepentant killer. There are supernatural elements (of course, it’s Coates), but this story also shimmers with the terrifying realism of possibility. What if there was a killer in the woods who tracked his prey like animals, playing mind games with them through the night? What would you do? How would you ever escape?

– Frances Carden

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Frances Carden
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