“Louise. August 1975. The bed is empty. Louise, the counselor— twenty-three, short-limbed, rasp-voiced, jolly—stands barefoot on the warm rough planks of the cabin called Balsam and processes the absence of a body in the lower bunk by the door. The cabin’s single flashlight, the absence of which is used, even in daylight, to indicate that campers have gone to the latrines—is in its home on a shelf by the door.”
Those are some lines from the opening to Liz Moore’s novel The God of the Woods. Barbara, the missing thirteen-year-old camper, is the daughter and only surviving child of the wealthy Van Laars, who not only own the camp but also live in a mansion on the property.
As the story progresses it weaves in and out of time between the 1950s when the Van Laars marriage began, 1961 when the Van Laars first child Bear went missing, and the two months of 1975 of camp before Barbara went missing and the first days of searching for her.
Some of the main characters include Barbara, the missing camper, Louise, her camp counselor, Tracy a lonely camper who hangs out with Barbara, Alice, Barbara’s mother who still suffers from the loss of her first child, T.J. the camp director, and Judy, the
investigative officer who solves the mystery of Barbara’s disappearance.
As the book jacket says, this “multithreaded story is a story of inheritance and second chances, the tensions between a family and a community, and a history that will not let any of them go.”
If you’re looking for a well-written mystery with fleshed out characters, then you must read The God of the Woods by Liz Moore.
