Why You'll Love This
Two children vanish from the same family, fourteen years apart — and the camp they disappeared from has been keeping secrets about both.
- Great if you want: class-divide drama woven into a slow-burning mystery
- The experience: layered and atmospheric — multiple timelines that gradually converge
- The writing: Moore juggles a large cast across decades without losing tension or clarity
- Skip if: you prefer tight, single-POV thrillers over ensemble storytelling
About This Book
When a teenage girl vanishes from an Adirondack summer camp in August 1975, the disappearance tears open something far older and far darker than a single missing child. Barbara Van Laar is the daughter of the family that owns the camp and effectively owns the surrounding community — and this is the second Van Laar child to vanish without explanation. What follows isn't simply a race to find Barbara, but a reckoning with decades of buried secrets, class imbalance, and the particular cruelty of powerful families who decide what gets remembered and what gets buried. The stakes are intimate and enormous at once.
Moore constructs the novel across multiple timelines and perspectives, weaving between the privileged and the working-class characters orbiting the Van Laar world with precision and evident care. The prose is cool and immersive, never flashy, but it accumulates real atmospheric weight — the Adirondack landscape feels like a character with its own agenda. What sets this apart from conventional thriller territory is Moore's sustained interest in the people the story isn't officially about: the employees, the witnesses, the ones history overlooks. That attention transforms a missing-persons mystery into something considerably more resonant.