The God of the Woods by Liz Moore Review: A Gripping Literary Thriller with Real Depth

The God of the Woods opens on a summer morning in 1975 at Camp Emerson, a sleepaway camp in the Adirondack Mountains owned by the wealthy Van Laar family. Thirteen-year-old Barbara Van Laar — a self-described "problem case" whose unhappily married parents openly disdain her goth appearance and what they call her "stormy" temperament — is discovered missing from her bunk. The disappearance immediately recalls a decades-old wound: Barbara's older brother, Bear, vanished from the same property years earlier, and a local gardener was wrongly convicted for it. Now, with escaped serial killer Jacob Sluiter — convicted of eleven murders in the 1960s — loose in the region, speculation runs wild. Into this charged situation steps Judy Luptack, a young and unproven assistant investigator who presses forward despite a bullying father and male colleagues who openly question whether women are suited for investigative work. As Judy digs deeper, the Van Laar family's secrets unspool: a father who cruelly abuses his wife, a mother so shattered by the loss of Bear — and by her own possible role in his disappearance — that she has no love left for her surviving daughter, and a community of working-class locals whose livelihoods depend entirely on the Van Laars' goodwill after the closure of the local paper mill collapsed the regional job market.

The novel arrived with a reception that placed it at the intersection of literary fiction and crime writing. The New York Times named it both a best thriller and a best crime novel of the year, and also included it among its Notable Books of the Year. People Magazine named it its number-one book of the year. Publishers Weekly awarded it a starred review, calling it astonishing, and critical coverage, also in a starred review, described it as "a compulsively readable novel that will appeal to fans of mysteries and historical fiction alike." The book spent 38 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller List as of April 2025, a figure that places it among the more enduring commercial successes of recent literary fiction. Netflix has greenlighted a series adaptation, to be written and produced by Moore alongside Liz Hannah, with Maya Hawke cast as Judy Luptack and Kerry Condon set to play Alice Van Laar — a development that underscores the story's broad cultural traction.

Kirkus Reviews, in selecting the book for its Best Books of 2024 list, praised Moore's structural control directly: the novel is "ever-expansive, intricate, emotionally engaging" yet "never seems overplotted," with every piece falling "skillfully into place" and every character, major and minor, leaving an imprint. That is a meaningful compliment for a novel of this scope, one that moves between multiple timelines and a large ensemble cast. Critics called it an "expertly paced thriller" that "plays dexterously with the tension between the wealthy and the working class they employ" — pointing to the novel's social architecture as one of its genuine strengths. Critics characterized it as "intricate" and "chillingly astute about the invisible boundaries demarcating social class," while critical coverage's own review argued the book is "more than just a mystery about children lost in the woods" — that it concerns "the relationships between parents and children and haves and have-nots," describing one character's grief over a lost child as "acutely, painfully real." The California Review of Books credited Moore's "inventiveness of the multiple stories and the effective structuring of past and present" as the engine of the novel's commercial and artistic success.

Moore built her reputation with Long Bright River, a novel that also explored families fractured by trauma, addiction, and systemic failure. The God of the Woods extends those thematic concerns — abuse, parental failure, communities hollowed out by economic forces beyond their control — into a larger, more historically grounded canvas. Rebecca Makkai, the New York Times bestselling author of I Have Some Questions For You, described it as "about the many ways we find and lose both ourselves and others," adding that it "will stick with me for a very long time." The novel has been compared to Donna Tartt's The Secret History for the way it, as critics noted, transports readers "so deeply into its richly peopled, ominous world that, for hours, everything else falls away." Moore's publisher has described it as her most ambitious and wide-reaching novel to date.

The God of the Woods is designed for readers who want their crime fiction to carry the weight of a family saga and the density of a social novel. Its multi-threaded structure, multiple timelines, and large ensemble reward patient readers who appreciate slow-burn revelations over propulsive plotting. The California Review of Books noted that readers found themselves "anxiously turning pages" to discover what happens next, but the novel's breadth — nearly 450 pages, with extensive secondary mysteries and background detail — means readers seeking a lean, stripped-down thriller may find the scope demanding. The book contains depictions of domestic abuse, spousal and parental psychological and physical violence, and the long aftermath of child loss; readers who are sensitive to those subjects should approach with that knowledge. For those drawn to the literary crime tradition — where setting, character psychology, and class dynamics matter as much as the mystery itself — the novel represents exactly the kind of work the genre produces at its most accomplished.