The Forest

- First Place (Mystery and Mayhem) and Finalist (Thriller and Suspense) Fiction (Chanticleer International Book Awards - 2024)

- London Book Festival Award (2024)

When the heiress of a business enterprise hires IFS to restructure the business, a diminutive systems expert must untangle false invoice, hidden labs and family loyalties before the cartel that uses the company for smuggling silences her and destroys a town.

Saskia van Essen arrives at Woodgrove to help  work with the heir, Peter, to restructure a family timber business, Rowland Enterprises. Small in stature but vast in skills – finance and systems – Saskia's an outsider welcomed into a family that believes in stewardship of its forest, its employees and its township.

Saskia expects paperwork and community meetings.
What she finds is darker: invoices for furniture that never existed, shipments of timber that don't match their declared origin, and a bypassed IT system whose vanished files point to deliberate erasure. As Saskia methodically maps people, money and forest lots, her presence disturbs the crime underbelly that's infected the business and the timber town.

Pushed to act by a horrific discovery that almost ends her life, Saskia must act quickly to unveil the truth without destroying the community she's come to admire.

How can Saskia force the truth to the surface when  loyalty, blood and profit are braided together?
***** OnLineBookClub review - The central characters in this book are so easy to love and connect to ... The author has a remarkable ability to capture the reader's attention. Her ability to describe scenes engagingly and arouse curiosity contributes to the factors that make this book difficult to put down.
***** Prairies Book review - Verbeek expertly challenges the reader's assumptions and creates a puzzling mystery ... Atmospheric and thoroughly engaging.
Comparable titles:

The Dry (Jane Harper) - a central investigator who gradually exposes local secrets; a strong sense of place.

State of Wonder (Ann Patchett) - an investigative mission into ethically fraught activity tied to a remote, ecologically complex setting.

The River (Peter Heller) - for readers who prize wilderness and natural-detail as a character in its own right.