BookLife Review by Carol O’Day: The God of the Woods (Liz Moore, author)
Mystery, whodunit, missing teen, death of a child, family secrets, substance abuse and addiction, upstate New York, summer camp, privilege and wealth, LGBTQ+ characters, domestic violence, infidelity.
Toggling back and forth in time between 1961 and 1975, The God of the Woods by Liz Moore is a slow-burning murder mystery and missing teen story set at a camp in upstate New York. The novel is rich with wealth, the beauty of the woods, the nostalgia of summer camps, bunkhouses and counselors, and rife with misbehaving adults. It is a multi-layered whodunit, told from multiple points of view, with a full menu of believable villains and decoys that keeps the reader guessing until the final chapters.
The novel opens in August of 1975 when head camp counselor Louise discovers an empty camper bunk in her cabin early one morning. To complicate matters, the missing camper, Barbara Van Laar, is the daughter of the wealthy owner of the camp. Both Louise and her counselor-in-training, Annabel, have spotty alibis; the prior evening had been Louise’s night off and she was out meeting a secret beau, and Annabel had been on duty, but had left her post when the campers feel asleep. Louise conducts a preliminary, thought fruitless, search before reporting the missing camper to the camp director, T.J. Hewitt. T.J. is the naturalist daughter of the camp’s prior director, Vic Hewitt, who is now frail and aging. T.J. has lived on the property her entire life.
T.J. takes the bad news up the hill to the home of the camp owners, Peter and Alice Van Laar. Peter is a third generation banker and camp owner and Alice is his younger, troubled wife. Alice has lived a decade and a half in a state of grief over her beloved son, Peter the IV, whom they called Bear. Bear disappeared from the property around their home at age 10 and was never found. Overcome by the loss, Alice has consumed alcohol and opioids for years to both dull her heartache and to remember Bear; she drifts in and out of conscious reality. In her grief, Alice was an emotionally unavailable parent to her second child, Barbara. Barbara idolized T.J., the camp director’s daughter, and was T.J.’s ever-present shadow when she wasn’t being moved from one private school to another for misbehavior. Fourteen years after Bear disappeared, Barbara goes missing. To thicken the plot, a serial killer escaped a nearby penitentiary and is believed to be hiding in the wooded areas surrounding the camp.
Judyta Luptack was born and raised in Schenectady, New York and is a proud recent graduate in New York State Troopers’ first female class. She is assigned to the Barbara Van Laar disappearance investigation. Female officers are a novelty in upstate New York in 1975. Judyta weathers sexism from colleagues and citizens alike. However, she is a skilled and thorough investigator and soldiers on.
There are at least as many suspects in Barbara’s disappearance as there were in Bear’s fourteen years earlier. The escaped serial killer on the run is a suspect. Barbara’s secret visits to a mysterious boyfriend every night after lights out suggest a love story gone awry or that Barbara may have run away. Counselor Louise’s sometimes boyfriend, wealthy J.P. McClellan, has a history of violence and he is a suspect. When a bloody camp uniform is found in the trunk of J.P. ‘s car, this cad of a boyfriend points the finger at Louise. She is arrested. Inspector Luptack is not sold on Louise as the culprit. Questions arise about the old investigation surrounding Bear’s murder and presumed death; the accused in that case died of a heart attack before he was tried, and the case was quickly closed. Time flips back and forth between the two cases; at times, the two cases seem related and at other times is just a tragic coincidence. As the investigation unfurls, even the behaviour of family members and staff is called into question.
The resolution of the dueling mysteries is wrapped in decoys, twists and surprises. Moore’s writing is laced with breadcrumbs and details that keep the reader guessing and curious right up to the final pages. In the tradition of the best mysteries, the reader embraces and then serially rejects suspects as new morsels of evidence are unearthed. The truths, when revealed, are at once tragic and oddly uplifting. The reader roots for the junior investigator as she rejects easy assumptions, the politics of wealth and privilege, and sloppy police work in her pursuit of justice.
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