The God of the Woods
by Liz Moore
It’s 1975. Early one morning, at a summer camp deep in the Adirondack Mountains, a counsellor discovers one of the campers is missing. Worse – the missing camper is thirteen-year-old Barbara van Laar, the daughter of the powerful and wealthy family who own the camp.
Barbara’s great-grandfather bought the land, hiring dozens of local labourers to reassemble a mansion he bought in Switzerland and had disassembled and shipped over. Later he added a summer camp, with the estate’s groundskeeper installed as camp director. The estate has been a major source of blue-collar jobs in the area ever since.
The family spends summers at the property and often hosts other prominent families for social events at their mansion and grounds, including a huge annual party. They generally keep themselves aloof from the camp, except that this year Barbara—the edgy and troubled daughter they have trouble dealing with — has demanded to be a camper.
Now she is missing. And chillingly, this is the second Van Laar child to disappear from this location. Her brother “Bear,” eight years old at the time, vanished 14 years ago. No sign of him has ever been found, and his disappearance has devastated their mother.
The story is told through several characters’ perspectives, including the Van Laar parents, camp counsellors, investigators, and community members. Multilayered, it moves back and forth in time to gradually reveal long-kept secrets, along with the lies and betrayals underlying them. Power imbalances, reflecting underlying class differences and routine misogyny, are the driver behind much of the story as it unfolds.
This is a strong suspense story, dipping into characters’ emotions, ambitions and fears. The setting, deep in the Adirondack woods, is spectacularly portrayed in Moore’s gorgeous prose. I didn’t anticipate the final resolution, though I did find it satisfying.
When published in 2024, God of the Woods reached #3 on the New York Times bestseller list. It also appeared on the USA Today bestseller list, was a Book of the Month pick, and won the Goodreads Readers’ Choice award for Best Mystery and Thriller.
Liz Moore was born in May 1983. She grew up near Boston, MA, where her father was the director of a nuclear medicine physics lab.
Though she initially enrolled in a science program at Barnard College in New York, she changed majors and ended up with a degree in English. While still an undergraduate she wrote her first novel, The Words of Every Song, based on her experiences working in a West Village guitar store. The book was published in 2007, and in 2009 she completed a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from Hunter College.
Her next two novels, Heft (2012) and The Unseen World (2016), received strong reviews though modest sales. However, her fourth book, Long Bright River (2020), became her breakout novel. It got her on the New York Times bestseller list, as well as Good Morning America’s book club and Obama’s list of best books of 2020, and has now been translated and published in 21 countries. In 2025 it was adapted into a TV miniseries.
Moore is Professor of English at Temple University, where she directs the MFA program in Creative Writing. She lives in Philadelphia with her husband and two children.
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