Why a Booktrail?
1995 : Into the woods. Count to ten. Only one of us comes home again.
The Counting Game
What you need to know before your trail
It is 1995 in the south-west of Ireland. Panic grips the village of Drumsuin when a teenage girl goes missing in the nearby forest. But Saoirse is not the first girl to disappear in those woods. And when it’s revealed she was playing the Counting Game – a ritual believed to ward off the forest’s evils – old superstitions send the community into turmoil.
One person saw what happened to Saoirse – her 9-year-old brother Jack – but he won’t tell the Gardai anything that helps. Freya, an English psychotherapist with her own history of grief, is then 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?
Locations
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Dublin
The book’s locations are all fictional, but they are based on real world locations. The forest in the book is based around Tibradden wood (Pine Forest) where I used to play when I was a child. It is in the Dublin mountains, next to the city of Dublin and not too far from the coast. The forest is very dense, dark and quite spooky at various points, and it is rumoured many bodies are buried up in the mountains where miles of rocks, gorse and tightly woven trees would make it hard for an unmarked grave to be found. If you take a walk up there on a quiet day, you could possibly be miles from anyone, and no one would hear your screams!
The beach in the novel is based around Shankill beach next to Killiney Bay in the south of Dublin. The sea can be calm but also rough in bad weather, and it has many white horses dancing atop the water on a bad day. It is deceivingly calm at times, but the currents underneath the water can be dangerous!
Killiney hill in south Dublin overlooks Killiney bay and has a small forest on top of it, so some of the descriptions from the novel are based on this location too!
Cork
The village in my novel is fictional but Cobh’s main street with its multi-coloured houses is what I had in my mind when I was describing the village in my book. It is by the sea, so in summer it is a lovely seaside town. In winter, it can have a cold slightly supernatural feel to it!
BookTrail Boarding Pass: The Counting Game
Destination/Location: Dublin, Cork Author: Sinéad Nolan Departure: 1995
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