The Light Between the Pines

In the stillness of a pine grove, a wrecked car tells a story no one wants to hear.

Red Miller has lived long enough to know when someone is lying, especially his daughter, Gina. On an afternoon in early fall of 1979, Red gives Gina’s boyfriend money he knows he won’t see again, then watches his daughter slip further away, wondering where it all went wrong. Five years later, a call from an Idaho deputy changes everything: Gina has vanished after a fatal car crash, and Red has a grandson he’s never met. Haunted by his failures and the memory of a wife lost too soon, Red travels to a small Idaho town in search of answers. But what he finds is more than a mystery; it’s a reckoning-of love misspent, of the fragile ties that bind us, and of the strange, stubborn hope that still lingers in the quiet spaces between regret and redemption. 

The Light Between the Pines is a powerful, slow-burning portrait of family and fallout, told with the sparse beauty and emotional precision of Kent Haruf’s Plainsong and Richard Ford’s Wildlife.

Warren Read is the author of the memoir, The Lyncher in Me, about his discovery that his great-grandfather had incited a lynching in 1920, and two novels: Ash Falls, which was called “a moody, haunting foray into rural Americana in the mold of Daniel Woodrell and Christian Kiefer,” by Kirkus, and One Simple Thing, which Publishers Weekly declared to be “a gripping tale of crime, intrigue, and complicated family relationships.” Warren earned his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University.