Clara’s Verdict
Jenny Blackhurst is a writer who understands that the best thrillers are built on secrets that feel genuinely impossible to carry – and The Hiking Trip is constructed on exactly that foundation. A young British backpacker goes missing on the West Coast Trail twenty years ago; a body is found in 2019; and the woman who knows what actually happened has spent two decades becoming someone else. Sara Poyzer’s narration for Audible Studios, at eight hours and seven minutes, keeps the tension coiled throughout a plot that moves between timelines with the confidence of a writer who knows exactly where every thread ends. With a 4.2 rating from listeners, the book is doing precisely what it sets out to do: unsettle you, hold you, and make you grateful you cannot put it down.
About the Audiobook
In 1999, nineteen-year-old Maisie sets off alone on the West Coast Trail in Vancouver after her friend Ruth pulls out at the last minute. On the trail she meets siblings Seraphine and Ric, and what begins as a pleasant shared adventure rapidly darkens when Seraphine goes missing, presumed dead. Maisie comes home from Canada carrying something she has never told anyone, and she has organised her subsequent life around that silence.
Twenty years later, Laura – a name whose significance we come to understand – is living a carefully constructed life in England. Then a body is found on the trail, and the only person who could connect Laura to what happened that summer resurfaces. Blackhurst builds her dual-timeline structure with intelligence: the past chapters are atmospheric and involving, with the beauty of the West Coast Trail rendered in enough detail to feel like a real location rather than a backdrop, and the present-day sections have the queasy urgency of someone watching a carefully maintained lie begin to unravel thread by thread.
The British Columbia setting is handled with particular care – the trail’s remoteness, its beauty, and the way isolation can transform group dynamics between strangers very quickly in both directions. Blackhurst uses the landscape as more than backdrop; the wilderness where things went wrong becomes as much a presence in the novel as the people who walked through it.
The book has been compared to M.J. Ford and Susi Holliday – writers who share Blackhurst’s interest in the lasting damage of a single terrible decision – and the comparison is apt. This is psychological thriller in the proper sense: the most dangerous revelations are interior ones.
The Narration
Sara Poyzer is an experienced thriller narrator who brings a quiet authority to the dual-timeline structure. The distinction between Maisie’s nineteen-year-old voice and Laura’s adult one is handled through subtle modulation rather than dramatic characterisation, which is the right choice – a character who has spent twenty years reinventing herself would not want to be obviously divided against herself. Poyzer’s pacing through the final act, where timelines converge and the central secret is finally exposed, is particularly assured.
What Readers Say
Rated 4.2 from listeners, with responses that reflect both strong enthusiasm and a minority view that the ending was more complicated than it needed to be. Great story, lots of twists, wrote one UK reader, while noting that the ending was a little bit more complicated than needed with all the different names back and forth. Another listener described reading it in a single sitting and praised the final twist. Several reviewers who had read Blackhurst’s earlier novels felt this one was slightly below her very best work while still recommending it without reservation. For new readers coming to Blackhurst fresh, this is a strong and effective introduction to her particular brand of psychological suspense.
Who Should Listen?
Fans of psychological thrillers built around long-buried secrets and the compounding cost of keeping them. Listeners who enjoy dual-timeline structures and wilderness settings. Anyone who has read M.J. Ford, Susi Holliday, or Louise Candlish and is looking for something in a similar register. At just over eight hours, this is a clean single-weekend listen with a satisfying, if intricate, resolution. Find it on Audible UK.
Jenny Blackhurst’s earlier novels – How I Lost You and The perfect Girlfriend – will give new readers a useful sense of her range before they come to The Hiking Trip. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, and major subscription platforms.
Jenny Blackhurst’s earlier novels will give new readers a useful sense of her range before they come to The Hiking Trip. For readers who have followed her career from the beginning, this is a confident and accomplished entry in a consistently strong body of psychological suspense fiction. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, and major subscription platforms including Scribd and Storytel.
Blackhurst is a writer who has clearly thought carefully about why her readers keep coming back, and the answer is consistent across all her books: she understands that the most frightening secrets are the ones that were kept for comprehensible, even sympathetic reasons, and she never lets her reader forget that. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
