The Counting Game

Author: Sinead Nolan

Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)

Published on 23 April 2026 by HarperCollins Publishers (HarperNorth) in the United Kingdom.

Paperback | 384 pages
198 x 129 | 260g

Into the woods.

Count to ten.

Only one of us comes home again.

'Sinead Nolan is one to watch' KARIN SLAUGHTER

1995, Ireland. Panic grips the village of Drumsuin when a teenage girl goes missing in the nearby forest.

Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in those woods. And when it’s revealed she was playing the Counting Game that day – a ritual believed to ward off the forest’s evils – old superstitions send the community into turmoil.

One person saw what happened to Saoirse. But 9-year-old Jack won’t tell the Gardai. Freya, an English psychotherapist with her own history of grief, is brought in to help the investigators break his silence.

As the race to find Saoirse alive accelerates, can Freya make Jack talk? Why is he keeping the forest’s secrets? And who is hell bent on driving Freya out of Drumsuin before the truth is discovered?

The Counting Game is a deeply haunting, atmospheric and emotional mystery, from an unmissable new voice in Irish crime fiction, perfect for fans of Tana French, Erin Kelly and Belinda Bauer