The spine-chilling Sunday Times bestseller

WINNER of the McIlvanney Prize 2020
Shortlisted for Bloody Scotland’s Scottish Crime Debut of the Year 2020
Longlisted for the Highland Book Prize 2020

Book blurb

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.

In the shadow of the Highland forest, Francine Toon captures the wildness of rural childhood and the intensity of small-town claustrophobia. In a place that can feel like the edge of the word, she unites the chill of the modern gothic with the pulse of a thriller. It is the perfect novel for our haunted times.

My thoughts

This book is a very slow burn on the crime fiction side. The vast majority of the book deals with what Lauren’s life is and has been for her and her dad, Niall, since her mother disappeared nearly a decade ago. It is written from Lauren’s perspective – what she sees, hears, thinks and feels. Niall is pretty much a functioning(?) alcoholic and drinking is how he deals with his problems specifically his wife’s departure. Lauren is somewhat overlooked as Niall tries to work to bring in money and get through each day.

We read about how Lauren is often looked after by her friend Billy’s mother. Lauren doesn’t really remember much of her mother as she was very young when she disappeared. There had been some kind of investigation but nothing came of it. Niall never talks about Lauren’s mother always changing the subject if she asks. Lauren is bullied at school and deals with this as best she can. An older girl Ann-Marie helped but she started going to a school in Edinburg as a boarder. Lauren turned to tarot cards, reading palms even though she’s still a youngster.

The mystery around what happened to her mother comes to a head when she and her dad, returning home from trick or treating on Halloween, come across a women wandering beside the road. They stop and pick her up, taking her home with them. There is a spooky, gothic bent to the story.

Then Ann-Marie comes home unexpectedly from school. She’s asked to sit with Lauren whilst Niall is playing in a band one evening. Anne-Marie is taking a real interest in what happened to Lauren’s mother.

Anne-Marie goes missing and this is when the book does become a crime fiction story. This, for me as a reader who enjoys crime fiction, was the best and most compelling part of the book. Indeed, I had almost given up on it delivering in this genre which made me wonder how it achieved its crime fiction accolades but it got there in the end!

I do read other genres and this may be why I kept reading. It was well written and intriguing enough for me to stay with the story but it was very slow paced in the build up and quickly reached its conclusion.

Book: Purchased

A Virtual Crime Book Club

It seems that we all thought that Pine would be a good fit in the Crime Fiction (CF) genre as it had been nominated and won CF awards. Indeed, we nominate a book to vote on given that months CF theme which was award winning books and obviously it met that criteria. However, there was a pretty strong consensus that it was not quite as much a crime fiction storyline as we anticipated. There was the mystery around Lauren’s mother’s disappearance which gave it a CF feel but it didn’t feel like a dominant storyline. Nevertheless all but one read to the end and were happy that the final third/fifty pages or so actually delivered on a Crime Fiction theme. We discussed what we felt CF looked like for us, we know that the CF genre is quite broad and has several sub genres and all agreed that it’s what book club’s do – broaden our book reading horizons. Still it was felt that it was more a book on dealing with grief, a gothic tale given a CF twist. It was mentioned that publishers have been looking for stories that cross genres to broaden appeal and that works, for us, provided it has a dominant CF storyline. It was a good discussion but one that didn’t feel appropriate to share.

Information

Published: Transworld Publishers Ltd | Transworld Digital (23 Jan. 2020) | ISBN: 9781473569232 | 336 pages | Imprint of Penguin Books

Buy: Hive UK | AmazonSmileUK | Bookshop.org (affiliate link) | Kobo | Your local bookshop | Your local library

Author: Francine Toon grew up in Sutherland and Fife. Her debut novel, Pine, won the 2020 McIlvanney Prize, was shortlisted for the Bloody Scotland Scottish Crime Debut of the Year and longlisted for the Highland Book Prize and the Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. 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. She lives in London and works in publishing.

@FrancineElena

Books

Pine is Frances Toon’s first and, so far, only book.