The God of the Woods by Liz Moore

The God of the Woods opens with a disappearance: fourteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar vanishes from her family's Adirondack summer camp in 1975, in eerie echo of her older brother's unsolved disappearance from the very same woods years earlier. As a young, determined investigator named Judyta leads the search, the novel moves fluidly between decades and perspectives, slowly peeling back the layers of the wealthy Van Laar family, the camp staff, and a community that has learned to keep its secrets close. What begins as a missing-person case gradually widens into something much bigger: a portrait of class, power, and the quiet damage done to the people who exist in the shadow of that power.

I'd hesitate to shelve this one as a straightforward thriller. It reads more like literary fiction that happens to be structured around a mystery, and it's much more interested in class and gender dynamics than in a race to solve the case. It reminded me of shows like Mare of Easttown; that same patient unspooling of a small community's history, where a single tragic event magnifies a generation's worth of grief and inequality. The pacing is deliberately slow, and by the half-way mark, patience had started to wear thin for me. The momentum I'd felt earlier began to drag. The ending, unfortunately, didn't quite deliver the payoff I was hoping for after such a long, careful build. I'm still not sure if it was the length or simply an ending that didn't land the way I wanted it to. After some thought, I've decided on 3 stars for this novel.

There's a lot to admire here: the atmosphere, the social commentary, the character work; and I think readers who love a slow-build literary mystery will find plenty to sink into. For me, though, I was left wanting a stronger sense of resolution after having committed so much time to reading this story.

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