Book review: Find Me by Holly Craig

Find Me by Holly Craig is a well-paced and action-packed read that goes beyond the thriller genre, digging into family relationships and roles we fall into… even into adulthood. Craig gives us three voices here: that of estranged sisters Hallie and Gertie who team up following their mother’s death for a last-ditch effort to find their brother Pete who disappeared in Tasmania three years earlier. We also offered another storyteller, one whose identity remains shut-off to us for much of the novel. We also hear from Pete through emails he sent home and (eventually) his journal.

About this book

When their brother Pete went missing two years ago on Mount Mercy, officials shook their heads. “He never should have been here; he was warned. Mount Mercy takes things.” After a disastrous first attempt to locate him, they called off the search.

Estranged sisters Hallie and Gertie are drawn back together when their mother’s dying wish is for her girls to find their brother. To bring him back home. Their brother was last seen at a mysterious commune at the foot of the mountain, where members perform strange rituals to keep a sinister presence that comes from deep in the woods at bay.

But this mountain has no mercy, and they shouldn’t be there either.

The sisters must navigate treacherous terrain as they confront what lies between them and what lives on the mountain. When Gertie also vanishes, the line between reality and nightmare blurs. Hallie realizes she must face Mount Mercy, and whatever is lurking in the forest, all alone.

My thoughts

Interestingly I’d recently read The Gardens by Emma Babbington before this, which also featured a commune. Here Hallie and Gertie venture upon the Peakers, an isolated and hidden community which Hallie has painstakingly located, not warning her sister that they’re going to be gatecrashing under false pretexts rather than tell the community that they’re there because it was their brother’s last known location. We learn a little about the group, founded 50 years earlier but many of the original ‘Peakers’ have left with only a small community remaining, including enigmatic but moody leader Dom and likeable but secretive Raf.

Hallie’s an SES officer, experienced hiker and climber, while Gertie is not. At all. The pair are warned before setting off that the mountain ‘takes’ people. An email from Pete referenced ‘it’ as well as he’s told:

When the trees stop fidgeting like anxious children, when the wind sucks in a tantrum, that’s when it comes. p 11

The sisters fight multiple times before they even set off on the hike to the community and things only get worse when they arrive. Dom begrudgingly allows them to stay (helped along by a hefty sum of money Hallie hands over). Once there Hallie in particular notices empty houses and missing couples. Then they witness the community sacrificing a pig and offering it to…. something. ‘A Tassie devil?’ Hallie wonders at one point. As I’m not a fan of the fantastic I continued to read as if the menacing force was not a mystical force, but something more tangible.

Of course uncovering Pete’s fate and understanding what’s going on with the Peakers is integral here. I certainly did not see [the direction this takes] coming nor did I have any sense of the mountain’s secrets. But it’s the relationship between Hallie and Gertie that’s most impactful. We eventually learn what caused their rift and Craig unpacks it slowly along with their antipathy toward each other and the genesis of those, which they’re forced to confront.

Hallie is someone I’ve grown to naturally avoid. Too much frazzle energy….

Hallie was always the teacher while I’d deliberately play-act the class clown, annoying her to the point of punishment. p 34

There’s also a sense of grief here following their mother’s recent death and Pete’s disappearance. Hallie’s narration also takes us back and forth in time as she and SES colleagues travelled to Mount Mercy following Pete’s disappearance, believing not enough was being done to search for him. Craig times the reveals brilliantly with past and present surprises hitting us at once. I should mention that Craig also sets this brilliantly and the surrounds become as much a character as its human counterparts. Finally I have to say, this would make a brilliant movie… a dark and moody atmospheric mystery.

Find Me by Holly Craig will be published in Australia by Simon & Schuster in late June 2026.

I received an advance copy of this book from the publisher for review purposes.