My partner is a member of a book club that rotates who hosts the meeting and chooses the book. When they meet at my house, I am welcome to participate. Their last meeting was here, and this is the book my partner chose.
It is historical fiction that takes place in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State at a summer camp run by an elite wealthy family. As the story opens in August of 1975, the daughter of this family who is attending the camp goes missing. More that a decade before this, her brother had gone missing in the same woods and had never been found. The novel explores both the search for the missing girl and what happened when the boy went missing so long ago.
The family is not very likable. The men are grasping. The mother of both missing children is weak and used by the family in a way that is both sad and maddening. There is a female detective that is my hero. She is the only woman on the force and is the one who quietly leads the investigation where it needs to go.
This is mostly a character study of a wide range of people. The author does an amazing job of keeping everything clear even as she jumps from character to character and goes back and forth through the timeline. That said, this book was only okay for me. I suspect that is because so many of the people in it are sad or unlikable. I am okay with that when the exploration of these feelings or flaws goes deeper than it does here. The author tried to write a banger mystery with deep character examination. While she didn’t fail, the result is not as good as if she had simply focused on one or the other.
My rating: 3/5
