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Barbara Van Laar is the 13 year old scion of a wealthy banking family. As the novel opens on this nearly 500 page novel, Barbara is discovered missing from her bunk at Emerson Camp. She is not the first Van Laar child to have been lost. 14 years ago at the very same camp her then 8-year old brother Bear also disappeared, never to be found.

That perfunctory dust-jacket synopsis is all you need. You are in the expert hands of author Liz Moore who elevates this mystery thriller to literary perfection. She is deftly jumping across decades while keeping tabs on over a dozen critical players. Hard enough, but each of them is so distinctly realized that I swear I'd recognize them if I ran into them on the street.

It's filled with affairs, misdirects, lies, betrayals, conspiracies and more but always within the bounds of plausibility. It smartly spans the 1950's through to the mid seventies, before social media and the pervasiveness of the internet. And, more tellingly, harkening back to a time when wealth necessitated a certain type of prim propriety that is completely absent in our current crop of crass capitalists.

This thing has all the smart, propulsive pacing of a true crime podcast with the literary chops of a Kazuo Ishiguro. This thing just hits.