"Birch in the fire goes. Tell me what the Lady knows."

Laura and her father, Niall, live in a small village surrounded by the pine forest. One night as they're driving, a mysterious woman appears on the street and Niall takes her home. The next morning she is gone. In a town full of secrets, Laura cannot trust anyone and sets out to discover who the mysterious woman is and why a teen from the village has gone missing.

This is a slow burn, gothic thriller with a desolate atmosphere. The setting is located in the Scottish highlands with a lot of the events occurring in the pine forest so you could feel the isolation and fear anytime someone was in the forest.

I liked Laura as she was an inquisitive child who sometimes looked after herself because her father drank heavily and was often focused on his own needs and feelings. Sometimes I felt bad for the family dynamic because you could tell Niall loved his daughter, but had his own issues to deal with. As for the other characters, I felt like they weren't fully fleshed out, that there was a lack of depth into their personalities. Some of them could have had more background information to establish a motive for some of their actions later on. It was like "so and so did this" and that was it with no explanation as to why 🤷🏾‍♀️

My only other problem was the fact that there was a slow build up to such little action. I hate when everything is revealed within the last bit of a book with such an anti-climatic ending, especially when it's a slow burn. I want a smooth transition and all of my questions answered!

With that being said, I still found this book enjoyable. It was spooky and mysterious, and I really liked little Laura.