This is a wonderfully atmospheric psychological mystery from Mindy Melia that grips from beginning to end. It is set in Duluth, Minnesota and the vast wild wilderness of the forests and lakes of Boundary Waters, locations which are evoked beautifully with Melia's rich descriptions. Josiah Blackthorn took his 9 year old son, Lucas, and disappeared into Boundary Waters. Ten years later, a 19 year old Lucas emerges to a storm of media attention when he is caught breaking and entering an outfitters. His violence and refusal to communicate has him incarcerated at the Congdon Psychiatric Facility. 23 year old Maya Stark is the newly promoted assistant speech therapist working under Dr Mehta. Maya is a damaged and lonely woman who has never got over her geologist mother leaving her as a child, she is still struggling to make any meaningful connections with another human being, and she herself was once a patient in Congdon. Dr Mehta believes that Maya is the person who can get past Lucas's unco-operative behaviour and muteness, and get him to integrate with others.

From difficult beginnings, a strong and intense connection begins to form between Lucas and Maya, born of their recognition of each other as kindred souls at the most elemental of levels. Maya researches other examples of people who share a similarity with Lucas's isolated wilderness experiences, such as the Russian Lykov family in Siberia and Ho Vans in Vietnam to help her to understand Lucas better. The police are keen to interview Lucas to find his father but Lucas refuses. He confides only to Maya about his terrors and fears for his sick father in Boundary Waters that led him to leave their remote and isolated home in search of medicine. Lucas's position resonates with Maya, inspiring a strong willed determination to help Lucas, irrespective of ethical and professional issues, with a disregard for keeping her job and all the consequences that might flow from her actions.

Mejia writes a twisted story of broken families, mental health, emotional damage, love, loss, and the unexpected connections between Lucas and Maya. She does an amazing job in characters and their development, the slow reveals of Lucas and Maya's history, really getting under the skins of them as individuals and giving us psychological portraits of people we cannot fail to be interested in. There are occasions when a little bit of suspension of disbelief is required, but this is, after all, fiction and they never once got in the way of me enjoying this enthralling character and location driven novel. A fantastic read that I recommend highly to others! Many thanks to Quercus for an ARC.

Having been a huge fan of “The Last Act of Hattie Hoffman“ I was intrigued to find out how Mindy Mejia would follow that up.

Leave No Trace is a gorgeous, emotionally resonant read, once again peppered with beautifully drawn characters who creep up on you. Descriptively this is brilliantly done bringing the wild and edgy setting to vivid life.

Into this comes Maya, once a psychiatric patient herself, now a person who helps others. But she and the untamed Lucas are drawn together by more than just a patient/therapist relationship and it will change them both in unexpected ways..

This is a road journey of sorts, both literally and figuratively as Maya deals with her past and her growing connection to Lucas. It is thought provoking and highly addictive- not some little part of me felt like disappearing into the wilderness myself, such was the power of it.

This was a clever, memorable novel and one that will stay with me in both character and setting and has put Mindy Mejia firmly on my list of must read authors.

Recommended.

This book left me torn: I loved the wilderness theme, but too much in the foreground was hard to swallow: that Maya should be employed at a psychiatric health facility where she had been a patient herself, and be trusted alone with a troubled young man while still in therapy herself was unconvincing. And the HUGE coincidence that ties everything together at the end was a problem.

For all that, Mejia knows how to write hard-hitting emotion, and there's some interesting research into families who choose to live off the grid for different reasons.

It seems that the ambitious material doesn't come together in a satisfactory way - maybe another rewrite was needed to do it justice? An interesting novelist, all the same.