THE GOD OF THE WOODS

‘The God of the Woods’ is a New York Times bestseller and crime thriller about two missing children lost to the woods in the Adirondacks, over a fourteen year period. A page turner and double mystery that makes the ideal Wild Card read for your book club.

The story is told through a number of voices all connected to a private summer camp in the Adirondacks, in Northeastern New York State. It’s the summer of 1975 and we discover early on from one of the camp supervisors that one of the teen girls, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. As well as being the daughter of the owners of Camp Emerson, we are reminded by her cabin buddy Tracey, that one of the guiding rules is: ‘When lost sit down and yell!’ This warning becomes more foreboding when we realise the disappearance of Barbara mirrors the unsolved vanishing of her brother, Bear in the summer of 1961.

The book shifts back and forth from the summer of ‘75 to the summer of ‘61 and through various accounts and interviews we begin to piece together what may and may not have happened. There are lots of likeable characters that you are drawn to - such as Judyta, a young investigator and the first female state trooper who is finding her way in a man’s world. We are also invested in Louise Donnadieu who is Barbara's camp counsellor, as well as being secretly engaged to John Paul, a privileged godson to the Van Laar family. There are lots of connections between the families and the local community of Shattuck and the story reads like a TV series, maybe ‘Succession’, with plenty of secrets, plot twists and chapter cliffhangers that makes you want to binge read to solve this double mystery, ‘that won’t stay buried’.

As outsiders we are fascinated by the Van Laar dynasty - run by the men, in particular Peter 1 and Peter 2 who developed the Van Laar Preserve which included their home, ‘Self Reliance’, an estate which that ironically was built with the labour of the local residents of Shattuck. There were lots of nods to American dynasties and TV shows which kept us all intrigued and talking about the book premise amongst friends as well as in book club.

If you enjoyed this novel, why not try 'All the Colours of the Dark' and 'We Begin at the End' by Chris Whitaker, both reviewed in the Den library.