Atria
Published on January 6, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
As Wildwood opens, we meet Trinity Campanella who has traveled to a small town in northern Wisconsin, seeking help at a renowned addiction clinic. After being kicked out of her home by strict parents, she has lived a hardscrabble life, and the opiates she started to take to make it a little bit easier have turned it into a nightmare. She’s determined this time to get clean, but a staff member at the clinic makes it clear it is reserved for a different class of patients. She’s referred instead to a different program nearby, one for people without money or options, people like Trinity.
Some months later, she’s the subject of a missing persons investigation by the tiny county sheriff’s department. The mobile home where she’s been living is a scene of carnage. It looks like someone lying in the trailer’s bed had their throat cut, blood spraying across the wall and drenching the bedding. Whatever happened there, though, they don’t find Trinity.
Eli North is getting his life together, quitting alcohol and working with a therapist on his post-Afghanistan PTSD. Working for the sheriff, who happens to be his mother, has given him a meaningful routine that steadies him. After being ordered by his boss to take a day off, he’s chopping wood, another activity that centers him, when his mother calls him back into work. Something bad happened in that trailer, and they need to find the woman who was reported missing – or locate her body. The only clue they find is a business card for the CEO of Hyperion Healthcare hidden in the missing woman’s discarded bra.
The investigation grows complicated when, without prior warning, an FBI agent shows up with a DEA agent who the sheriff recognizes. He’s been undercover, posing as the assistant manager of a local country club, and while he’s reluctant to share any information with local law enforcement, he finally reveals that Trinity was an asset working for him as a confidential informant. Though they all want to find her, they have different motives, and nobody totally trusts the DEA agent, who seems to have his own agenda. Interspersed in between the chapters about the investigation, we learn Trinity’s story from her point of view.
The author’s second novel, following Northwoods (2024) has a sure and empathetic hand when it comes to depicting addiction and the ways our broken healthcare system fails to address it, building a plot out of the wreckage that ties together the lives of addicts in rural Wisconsin to the excessive wealth it generates for the few. While the stakes are higher and the ethical lapses more dramatic than in everyday reality, it’s built on an authentic understanding of the addiction treatment industry and the experience of those it’s meant to heal. While the procedural aspects take a little more liberty (it’s not likely a young FBI agent would be called back to Chicago to become the SAC, a top leadership position in a major field office) it all works well in a mystery that combines evocative writing, intriguing characters, and a twisty pace in a setting that comes alive.