The Counting Game
- Judith D Collins
- Sep 24
- 2 min read
By: Sinéad Nolan
ISBN: 9781668099407
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Date: 04/07/2026
Format: Hardcoer
My Rating: TBR (ARC)
Into the woods.
Count to ten.
Only one of us comes home again.
When a teenage girl disappears from her small Irish town and a therapist is brought in to break the silence of the only witness, old wounds are reopened in a search that becomes a race against time—perfect for fans of Tana French and Liz Nugent.
Southwestern Ireland, 1995: Two children go into the forest. Only one comes out.
When thirteen-year-old Saoirse Kellough goes missing, panic grips a rural Irish community. Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in the woods, and the only witness—her troubled younger brother, Jack—refuses to speak. Saoirse went missing when they were playing the Counting Game, a ritual believed to ward off evil, and Jack has sworn to protect the forest’s secrets.
Freya Hemmings, a psychotherapist still healing from the loss of her own daughter, is brought in to help investigators break Jack’s silence. As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, the search threatens to unravel a family facing the unthinkable. Everyone is a suspect, and the closer Freya gets to Jack, the more danger she finds herself in.
Haunting and emotional, The Counting Game is a suspenseful debut from an unmissable new voice in crime fiction.
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About the Author
Photograph by Jason Holland
Sinéad Nolan grew up playing in the forests and on the beaches of leafy County Dublin, Ireland. She was a regular freelance feature writer for the Sunday World and the Irish Independent and has had short stories shortlisted for the Momaya Press Awards and the Francis McManus Awards for RTE Radio. Apart from writing, she works in private practice as a BACP Registered Counsellor seeing clients in central London. INSTAGRAM
