To say that Liz Moore’s latest novel, her fourth, was her finest to date may lead those who have never read her to believe that she spent years limbering up and taking cautious steps before finally hitting her stride. This isn’t the case at all. Her first three books were not apprentice work. Each was satisfyingly accomplished and rightfully acclaimed. Her vibrant 2007 debut, The Words of Every Song, charted the hopes, dreams, and disappointments of various people trying to get ahead in the music industry. Heft (2012) was a moving depiction of two lonely, damaged souls — an obese recluse and a self-destructive teenager — negotiating life’s hard knocks, while The Unseen World (2016) was an ingenious coming-of-age story about a young girl decoding her father’s brilliant mind and hidden past.

But then in 2020 came Long Bright River. Taking its title from a snippet of verse in Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters (“Beneath a heaven dark and holy, / To watch the long bright river drawing slowly”), Moore’s novel unfolded beneath the darkest heaven and in a particularly bleak hellscape. The Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington, a place blighted by catastrophic levels of opioid addiction, became, in Moore’s hands, the hunting ground of a serial killer. The book followed a policewoman in her frantic search both to snare a murderer and to find her missing sister, a sex worker and heroin addict, before she ended up the next victim. 

Moore, who lives in Philadelphia, drew on her experience with the city’s grittier corners and its vulnerable and downtrodden members of society to produce a hard-hitting and at times heartrending novel that defied its “thriller” classification. In her latest offering, The God of the Woods, Moore once again goes beyond the remit of the genre. Two possible crimes lie at the heart of the book, but Moore branches out and brings in other elements, taking creative risks in the process.

The novel opens with a cause for alarm at an Adirondack summer camp. One morning in August 1975, Louise, a counselor at Camp Emerson, notices that 13-year-old Barbara isn’t in her bunk. Any camper’s absence is worrying, but this girl’s disappearance is unthinkable. She is Barbara Van Laar, the daughter of the wealthy family that owns the camp. She isn’t the first Van Laar child to go missing: Fourteen years ago, Barbara’s brother Bear vanished from the same area and was never found.

T.J. Hewitt, the camp director, assembles the counselors and initiates a search for Barbara. Did she run away? If she ventured out alone into the vast forest and wandered off the main trail, would she remember the most important camp rule that is drummed into all campers — when lost, sit down and yell? There would be another reason to yell. Barbara’s cabinmates liked to spook each other at night with stories of ghosts that haunted their surroundings but also tales about an all-too-real bogeyman. Jacob Sluiter, nicknamed Slitter, was imprisoned for killing 11 people at campgrounds or in remote cabins in the 1960s. Recently he escaped from jail. Has he claimed his 12th victim? 

When Barbara still isn’t found, a team of investigators arrives on the scene. One of them is young new recruit Judy Luptack, the first woman in the New York State Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Determined to prove herself and make headway in the case, Judy must contend with male colleagues getting too close for comfort or not taking her seriously. She is patronized even more when she conducts interviews with members of the Van Laar clan — not least Barbara’s grandfather, whose demeanor during one exchange veers quickly from dismissive to aggressive. “Rich people,” Judy tells herself afterward, “generally become most enraged when they sense they’re about to be held accountable for their wrongs.” 

To discover what those wrongs might be, Judy casts her net wider and looks into Bear’s disappearance in 1961 despite her no-nonsense boss’s blunt reminder that the case is closed. As investigators comb the woods, search a lake, and make a breakthrough up a mountain, Judy unearths secrets and lies. Then Sluiter is captured and agrees to talk, but only to a woman. The sole female investigator in the BCI accepts her toughest challenge yet. But can she get a mass murderer to open up and shed light on two missing siblings?

Running to almost 500 pages, The God of the Woods is an ambitious work. It combines two genres: police procedural and family drama. A lesser writer might have incorporated too much of the latter at the expense of the former — the result being a baggy, bloated novel with little in the way of crime and all suspense, intrigue, and excitement diluted by accounts of domestic strife. Fortunately, Moore knows exactly what she is doing and gets the balance just right, keeping her reader gripped by two baffling mysteries and absorbed in the Van Laars with their private tragedies and dysfunctional relationships. “They’re a strange family,” Judy’s mentor informs her. “Too many generations with too much money. It addles the brain.”

But to reap the book’s considerable benefits, we need to stay focused. Moore tells more than one tale by way of numerous time shifts and multiple character perspectives. Disorienting at first, the layered, nonlinear narrative soon stimulates and allows us to view not just events but also people from different angles. Those people make up a large and varied cast. We meet shy and self-conscious camper Tracy, who has nothing in common with the other girls around her, all affluent New Englanders and Manhattanites, but she comes out of her shell when she finds an ally, and object of affection, in her bunkmate Barbara. There is Alice, Barbara’s mother, who depends on pills and booze to numb the pain of losing her son and living with a controlling and unfeeling husband and an angry and rebellious daughter — a daughter she is incapable of loving. And back in the past is Carl, a gardener on the Van Laar estate who joined the search party for Bear and was then framed for the boy’s abduction.

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Moore constructs an elaborate guessing game. We take stock of characters’ evasions and shadowy deeds. Many have something to hide or somewhere illicit to go. What kind of “nocturnal excursions” does Barbara regularly make after the girls in her cabin have turned off the light? Where was her counselor, Louise, on the night she disappeared? We try to make head or tail of scattered anomalies: a carving of a brown bear, an AWOL chef, a coat of pink paint on Barbara’s bedroom wall, and blood-spattered clothes in the trunk of a car. And is there any significance to Barbara’s confession to Tracy that she is prone to doing bad things? “I have that problem,” she reveals. “I think — what would be the worst thing I could do in this moment? And then I do it.”

We could take Moore to task for recycling certain tropes from her last novel: missing persons, divided families, two mysteries running parallel, and even a serial killer on the loose. However, it is clear that this writer has not run out of ideas, nor has she forgotten how to tell a compelling story. As the plot thickens, tension mounts, and components click neatly into place, it seems churlish trying to find fault with a book that has become a riveting, multithemed page-turner.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.