The God of the Woods by Liz Moore
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This is a well-written, intriguing murder mystery. Or is it? I ask because it appears to be a murder mystery at first, but really it’s about the disappearance of two children, “Bear” Van Laar who disappeared in in 1961 and then his teenage younger sister Barbara in 1975. The Van Laars are a wealthy family of snooty New York bankers who own an estate in a nature preserve including an upscale summer camp for kids. Bear’s body was never found, but a local firefighter who had befriended him, and then died of a heart attack right after the boy went missing, was blamed and murder was assumed. Barbara, now a teen in 1975 – the setting of the book’s “current day” – has decided to attend the camp her family owns. She thrives at the camp, but kids and counselors alike are sneaking around, drinking, having romantic encounters, and smoking pot. Fighting and much ado follow and Barbara disappears. The state police are soon called in and Judyta “Judy”, a rookie investigator, becomes the investigative focus of the book. She makes some significant investigative finds that others overlooked or at least didn’t think of.
It’s a long book (over 500 pages) with a long list of characters, too many to set forth here. I printed a paper list when I was 1/3 of the way through with 14 names on it, then had to add a half dozen more later. They all come into play, so don’t skip over any of them as minor. Have some patience because the pace is a bit slow at first, but it’s worth it. It jumps back in forth in time as is the current fashion, but I really appreciated how every chapter, even subsections, are marked in bold print with the year/day of that section as well as the name of main character followed there. I recommend the book. It gave me many hours of entertainment.
That said, I have one significant criticism. The book is ridiculously sexist, portraying almost every male and many women, too, as condescending sexist pigs especially toward Judy but toward other women and girls, too. The author is guilty of exactly what she portrays the men as doing only in reverse. I’m familiar enough with the publishing industry to know that 80% or so of fiction book buyers are female so portraying men badly sells books, but this one is comically inaccurate and very unfair. I was in the FBI in 1975 and worked with both male and female agents, local police too, in three states, including New York. Never once then or after did I ever hear an officer, agent, or civilian call a woman agent/officer “Honey” or “Dear” or anything similar as happens in the book. Never did I see an interviewee just walk away from one mid-interview, either. If the author objects to how the men treat Judy as a helpless little girl, then maybe she shouldn’t make Judy behave like one. Judy chickens out when she hears footsteps upstairs and runs to get some men cops to help her investigate. Jeez, she’s 26, has a gun and years as a state trooper. Any investigator I ever worked with would have gone up herself gun drawn. She is often described as afraid, nervous, or embarrassed. She lives with her parents and is afraid to move out for fear it might upset them. Both her partner, Hayes, and the captain from Albany publicly praise her good work often and give her significant leads to cover, but at the end she says something to the effect that every investigator she ever met treated her like she couldn’t make a good investigator because she was a woman. Judy is the one who acts biased and childish.
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I’m Starting to Worry About This Black Box of Doom by Jason Pargin
