Looking for a good mystery? Paul O’Connor takes a look at a 2024 book by a mystery author who’s new to me. Sounds intriguing.

Reviewed by Paul T. O’Connor

THE GOD OF THE WOODS. By Liz Moore. Riverhead Books. 476 pages. $30, hardcover.

Liz Moore can really tell a story, as anyone who read her 2020 bestseller, Long, Bright River, can attest. With The God of the Woods, she provides us with another thriller that is every bit as gripping and well written.

It is summer 1975 at an Adirondacks camp for mostly wealthy children, and Barbara Van Laar, 13, has disappeared. She wasn’t in her bunk when everyone woke up one August morning. She is the daughter of the camp’s owner, and her disappearance hauntingly repeats the family tragedy of 14 years earlier, when her 8-year-old brother, Bear Van Laar, disappeared from the family’s adjacent summer compound.

Despite a quick start, the story does slow a bit in the first dozen chapters or so. Moore is just laying the groundwork.

What follows is a web of plots and subplots, suspects and victims, and enough clues to make any detective salivate. And, spoiler alert, every clue counts. Moore follows Chekov’s old directive that if there’s a shotgun above the fireplace, it must be fired at some point.

But the fun of this story is that the clues can lead anywhere. Maybe this is the bad guy, or the bad girl, or maybe that one is. This one was obviously framed, or was he or she? Everyone seemingly has a motive for doing something wrong, but motives can also be deceptive, leading us down blind alleys.

Did the most obvious villain do it? I considered him a distraction, someone too obviously evil for Moore’s storytelling imagination. Or, was that the very twist I wasn’t expecting? I’m not telling.

Moore moves her story back and forth between the events of 1961, when Bear disappeared in the woods, and 1975, when Barbara disappears from her camp cabin. And she moves the narrative back and forth within those years, also. One chapter might focus on August 1975, the next on July of that year. She’s a master of building the story from the middle out in both directions.

The camp sits on an enormous forested preserve and specializes in teaching survival and wilderness skills. Bear may have been only 8, but already he was a skilled outdoorsman on the day he disappeared.

There are subplots: The newly minted female detective who is a first for New York’s state police and her struggles to be accepted. The camp counselor who stayed out late and didn’t notice whether Barbara was in the cabin when she returned to her bunk. The counselor-in-training who didn’t come back to the cabin on time, either.

But central to the story is the family of bankers known as the Van Laars. They are about as unlikeable as any central characters can get. They are rich, arrogant and self-absorbed. In their minds, everyone exists only to serve them. They have plenty of friends just as loathsome, and you want most of them to be the bad guys.

But if you guess this ending, then maybe you should be a detective. I didn’t come close.

 With The God of the Woods, Moore has another brilliant read that, once it gets going, keeps its readers turning the pages.