THE GOD OF THE WOODS by Liz Moore

At a summer camp in 1975 in the Adirondacks, Barbara Van Laar, the daughter of the camp owners, goes missing.  Oddly enough, her younger brother, Bear, has been missing for over a decade, and the same serial killer was at large during both disappearances.  Hence, we actually have two mysteries to solve here.  Enter Investigator Judy Luptack, mostly underestimated because she is female.  She and the camp director, T.J. Hewitt, are the most competent women in this book.  Louise, a camp counselor, was partying the night of Barbara’s disappearance, but she basically just has bad taste in men.  The award for most insipid of the women is Alice Van Laar, Barbara’s mother, who has basically checked out and given herself over to alcohol and tranquilizers since her beloved son disappeared.  Her husband and his father are arrogant jerks who seem a little too tight-lipped to be innocent, but with red herrings galore, any guess is likely to be wrong.  The women, plus Barbara’s bunkmate and minus T.J., get multiple chapters in the book, as does the serial killer, so that the Van Laar men remain somewhat enigmatic.  The timeline goes back and forth, but the author labels the chapters very specifically to alleviate the guesswork.  I would have liked a little more suspense here, maybe some cliffhangers, but Judy is the character who captured my attention.  At 26, she has trouble breaking free of her parents, despite her successful career, because she is unmarried.  That problem seems more 1950ish than 1975 to me, but whatever.  And don’t let the length of this book turn you off, as this is a fast read, with mostly short chapters, so that stopping places are easy to come by, if you really want to stop.