A clever, tightly plotted thriller that rewards patience and a slower read than you might expect from the genre.
Plot in a Nutshell
Fourteen years after a young boy from the wealthy Van Laar family vanished in the wilderness, his teenage sister goes missing in the same forest. The disappearances may be linked , or they may simply expose long-simmering tensions within a community that has always lived in the family’s shadow. The novel unfolds across dual timelines, moving gradually towards the truth of what happened then, and what is happening now.
Thoughts
What struck me first was the pace. This is the definition of a slow burn: measured, deliberate, and confident enough not to rush its reveals. There are plenty of twists, but they’re handled quietly, without the sense of authorial elbowing that can undermine suspense. I kept guessing, but never felt tricked.
The dual timeline worked extremely well for me. Rather than duplicating information, each strand adds something distinct, inching the story forward from different angles. Likewise, the multiple narrators avoid a common pitfall of this kind of structure: no one is simply restating events we already know. Instead, the voices layered meaning and different perspectives, creating a fuller picture of both the mystery and the world it exists in.
That world-building is one of the book’s real strengths. Some of the subplots and secondary perspectives don’t strictly “advance” the central mystery, but they do add captivating details. The forest, the town, the social hierarchies all feel lived-in and dangerously real. This is part of what allows the novel to speak so clearly about class and belonging: who is protected, who is tolerated, and who is quietly disposable when things go wrong.
“They’re a strange family,” he says. “Too many generations with too much money. It addles the brain. You ever notice how the children of rich people are never as smart as the parents? Never as ambitious, never as successful? You gotta have something to strive for in life. What I think, anyway.”
The 1960s and 1970s setting is particularly interesting and effective. I found myself wondering why this period was chosen, and the answer seems clearest in the figure of Judy, the young female investigator. Perhaps the constraints of the era allow her competence and persistence to shine more starkly than they might in a contemporary setting. The book is attentive to power, gendered, economic, institutional but never falls into labouring the point.
There is, however, a trade-off to this richness. The novel is busy, and while I enjoyed the range of narrators, not every strand felt equally necessary. For me it mostly worked, though there were moments when momentum paused a beat too long.
There’s also a noticeable imbalance in characterisation. The female characters are consistently stronger and more well rounded, which I suspect is a conscious choice and one I largely appreciated. That said, this is a story about children, and the children themselves are oddly distant. Bear exists mostly as a sketch before his disappearance, and Barbara is filtered through Tracy’s near-hero worship. The effect is interesting, it reinforces the way children are often overwritten by adult need and guilt but it does slightly blunt the emotional impact. I wanted to know them both better in order to feel their loss.
The ending, which some readers may find frustrating, worked for me. Its ambiguity feels aligned with the novel overall: uncertainty, silence, and the stories communities tell themselves to survive. But readers expecting neat answers or a more conventional mystery ending may find it anticlimactic.