Books Like The God of the Woods: 9 Thrillers Where the Official Story Was a Lie

Did you know Taylor Swift got caught reading this one? Fans watching Taylor Swift: The End of an Era on Disney+ noticed she had an audiobook going, worked out which novel it was from the excerpt, and the audiobook went viral. According to the South China Morning Post, Barack Obama had already picked it as one of his favorite books of 2024. So Liz Moore wrote a nearly 500-page literary thriller about a girl who disappears from summer camp and ended up with the Obama list and the Taylor Swift bump. That’s a good run.

Here’s the number that made me want to read it, though. According to FBI data compiled by the Murder Accountability Project, American police arrested and charged someone in 68.8% of murders last year, up from a low of 52.3% in 2022. That’s the best clearance rate in a quarter century, and it still leaves roughly three in ten murders with nobody charged at all.

Those cases don’t go quiet. People who knew the dead person still need an answer, so somebody in town comes up with one, and that version becomes what gets said at the grocery store, at wakes, and eventually to their own kids.

The God of the Woods book opens in August 1975, when a counselor at Camp Emerson finds an empty bunk. The girl who’s gone is Barbara Van Laar, thirteen, and her family owns the camp and employs most of the region. Her older brother Bear vanished from the same camp fourteen years earlier. A gardener was prosecuted for that one, and per Kirkus Reviews, people around town will tell you he was framed.

I went looking for books like The God of the Woods by Liz Moore the week I finished it. In every one I kept reading, somebody had already settled on an answer before page one. A verdict, a coroner’s line, or a family that agreed years ago not to discuss it. The whole book is one person arguing with that answer.

I know how that works from the wrong side of it. I grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut, one of the richest towns in America. We didn’t have money. I wrote it this way in Where to Nest: “In New Canaan, my family was always the town trash, or as people more politely called it, ‘Townies.’” It meant two cops on a doorstep while I was babysitting.

There was also that one time in high school when I was babysitting, and I opened the door to find two police officers. My mind raced. Had the parents died in a crash on their way home and I—a teenager—would have to raise these two kids on my own?

“Hi, little lady, do you know that man over there?” one of the cops asked, pointing to my dad’s beat-up second-hand SUV parked nearby on the street. On his weekends with me, he parked outside to take me to his place after I was finished at work. The cops, seeing his old truck in between all the mansions, must have been concerned when he said something along the lines of, “I’m waiting for a teenage girl to come out of that house over there.” I explained that he was my dad.

“Oh my God, are our kids okay?” The parents that I was babysitting for screamed as they ran out of their car, having just come home from dinner to cop cars outside their home.

“Just a mix-up,” the officer said. I tried to smile politely, not wanting to lose my job.

Where to Nest, Chapter 13

Just a mix-up. Nobody got arrested, and I smiled politely because I did not want to lose the job. But two officers came out to that doorstep because an old truck was parked in the wrong zip code, and towns do the same thing with much bigger questions than a parked truck. In The God of the Woods, the man prosecuted for Bear Van Laar’s disappearance was the gardener.

I write this kind of book now. The Storm Reaper is set on Fire Island, where I spent every childhood summer, and the case at the center of it sat closed for ten years because the police kept writing “storm-related” on the paperwork.

How I Picked These Books

I read a lot of books like The God of the Woods to learn how to build a cover-up a reader can see through before the detective can. Here’s what I looked for:

1. Somebody has to have already settled it: A verdict, a conviction, a coroner’s line on a form, an autopsy that came back inconclusive and got treated as a conclusion anyway, or a family that agreed years ago not to discuss it. Once that answer’s in place, you get to spend four hundred pages knowing more than the file does.
2. You have to want to argue with the file: Somebody in each of these is stuck on the wrong end of the official answer. Told they were confused. Convicted on it. Unable to remember it. I picked for how badly I wanted to hand that person a recorder, so that when the answer finally moves you get to watch somebody write down what should’ve been written years ago.
3. You have to feel how closed the place is: A family camp in the Adirondacks, a farm town two years into a drought, an Oxford college, a barrier island in hurricane season. Everybody who could answer the question has been running into everybody else at the same grocery store for twenty years. So you read the whole thing knowing the person who knows is somewhere in the room.

The 9 Best Books Like The God of the Woods

1. The Dry by Jane Harper (2017)

Three members of the Hadler family are found shot to death on their property outside Kiewarra, an Australian farm town that has not had rain in two years. According to Pan Macmillan Australia, “everyone assumes Luke Hadler committed suicide after slaughtering his wife and six-year-old son,” and federal police investigator Aaron Falk “returns to his hometown for the funerals and is unwillingly drawn into the investigation.” Kiewarra is the second suspect here, and Harper never lets it off that hook.

Falk knew Luke better than any of the investigators, and he’s also the one man in Kiewarra who can’t afford anyone looking too closely at his own past. According to Kirkus Reviews, he “and his father were run out of town when he was accused of killing his girlfriend,” Luke gave him an alibi, “more than one person in town knows he was lying,” and it is Luke’s parents who ask Falk to find the truth. Everybody in Kiewarra is already suspicious of everybody else before a single body turns up. It got a film with Eric Bana as Falk.

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2. The Storm Reaper by Kristen Van Nest

On a barrier island where folklore says a ghost appears before hurricanes, a serial killer has been hunting in plain sight for a decade. He kills during the storm and lets the tide carry the body out, and the police write down another storm-related death. It worked until the currents shifted and the bodies started washing back. Violet Crisp was sixteen when she survived the storm that killed her best friend and saw a man get murdered in the fog on the same night. The chief said she was confused by grief. Her own father said she was making it up.

She spent the next ten years building a case nobody believed, and that’s the part I care about most. Violet’s twenty-six now, working as a police officer on Fire Island, and the case she’s carrying is a corkboard of photographs, case files and news clippings nobody else has ever asked to see. A new chief is listening. Another storm is coming, and another body has washed up. The legend underneath it is real: “One of my friends from Fire Island told me about Pawleys Island and the folklore that it’s based on,” and I put the Gray Man straight into the book. It is Book 1 of the Violet Crisp series, with a new release every spring, just in time for your summer reading list.

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3. All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda (2016)

According to Simon & Schuster, it has been ten years since Nicolette Farrell left Cooley Ridge after her best friend Corinne disappeared without a trace, and “within days of Nic’s return, Annaleise goes missing.” The detectives questioned Nic, her brother Daniel, her boyfriend Tyler, and Corinne’s boyfriend Jackson, and of those four only Nic ever left town. Annaleise going missing is what finally forces somebody to pull Corinne’s file back out, which is how most missing girl thrillers get moving. Miranda leaves ten years between Corinne and Annaleise, the way Moore leaves fourteen between Bear and Barbara, and then tells you the second disappearance first.

It runs backwards. According to Simon & Schuster, the novel is “told backwards—Day 15 to Day 1—from the time Annaleise goes missing,” and the publisher also lists it as a New York Times bestseller and a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. I was skeptical. It sounds like a gimmick you’d abandon by chapter four. Then you catch yourself doing exactly what Cooley Ridge did for ten years. You’re holding a conclusion and working backwards to a story that gets you there.

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4. Long Bright River by Liz Moore (2020)

Mickey Fitzpatrick patrols Kensington, in Philadelphia. Her estranged sister Kacey works the avenue. A young woman turns up dead. Mickey checks the body to be sure it is not Kacey. Then she sees the marks on the woman’s neck. Nobody in this book covers anything up. The women just stop being anybody’s priority. Of the two Liz Moore books in this post, this is the one to read next if you liked the way she writes about who gets looked for.

According to Kirkus Reviews, the autopsy comes back inconclusive, so the victim becomes “just another dead junkie hooker on Kensington Ave.,” as far as Mickey’s fellow cops are concerned. Two more women turn up strangled in the same district. Mickey breaches protocol looking for her sister, and it costs her. Kirkus also reports that the eight-episode Peacock miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried changed the killer’s method from strangulation to a drug and turned the grandmother, Gee, into a grandfather, and Gee being a woman is most of the reason the family silence works in the book.

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5. The Counselors by Jessica Goodman (2022)

Goldie Easton is one of the few townies at Camp Alpine Lake, an elite Vermont summer camp. According to Kirkus, “Goldie’s parents work at the camp every summer, so Goldie has always been able to attend for free—something that sets her apart from the rest of the uber-wealthy campers.” Just before the campers arrive, her boyfriend Heller is found dead in the lake. Of the recent summer camp thrillers this is the closest structural twin to The God of the Woods, except Goldie is eighteen rather than thirteen, and she works at the camp instead of owning it.

This is the one I’d hand to someone who liked the class divide in The God of the Woods and wished the book had stayed down at the level of the people who work there. According to Kirkus Reviews, Goldie “took the rap for a car accident that killed one of her classmates in order to protect Heller, her boyfriend, who’d been driving drunk.” So the girl asking who killed Heller has already taken a rich kid’s consequence once, on purpose.

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6. The It Girl by Ruth Ware (2022)

April Clarke-Cliveden was the first person Hannah Jones met at Oxford. She was dead before the end of their first year. A decade later, according to Gallery/Scout Press, “the man convicted of killing April, former Oxford porter John Neville, has died in prison,” and a young journalist turns up at Hannah’s door with new evidence that Neville may have been innocent. Hannah testified at Neville’s trial, which makes his conviction partly hers.

Hannah is the reason Neville went to prison, and the journalist at her door knows it before she does. Ware also makes her pregnant when he turns up, so there’s a hard clock on how long she can afford to keep pulling the thread. Gallery/Scout Press lists it as an instant New York Times bestseller.

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7. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart (2014)

The Sinclairs summer on a private New England island belonging to Cadence Sinclair Eastman’s grandfather. One summer something happens to Cadence that nobody afterwards will explain. According to Delacorte Press, the setup runs as a list: “A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies.” There is no sheriff anywhere in this book. The Sinclairs handle it themselves, at the dinner table.

Lockhart wrote it for teenagers and it’s the shortest book here. According to Amazon MGM Studios, after the accident “everyone, including her beloved Liars, seems to have something to hide,” and Cadence spends the novel trying to recover a memory that every adult around her has a reason to leave buried. The Sinclairs change the subject, hand her a drink, and go down to the beach. I read the last thirty pages standing up in my kitchen. Delacorte lists it as a #1 New York Times bestseller, and Amazon MGM Studios confirms the eight-episode Prime Video series from co-showrunners Julie Plec and Carina Adly MacKenzie, with Emily Alyn Lind as Cadence.

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8. The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger (2023)

According to Atria Books, on Memorial Day 1958 in Jewel, Minnesota, “the body of wealthy landowner Jimmy Quinn is found floating in the Alabaster River, dead from a shotgun blast.” The investigation falls to Sheriff Brody Dern, and the town picks its suspect immediately: Noah Bluestone, a Native American World War II veteran who has recently come home with a Japanese wife. Nobody in Jewel waits for the autopsy. It’s also the slowest book here by a distance.

Dern stands between Bluestone and the men who want him, which no other lawman on this list does. He came home from the same war as half the men in Jewel, and those are the men leaning on him now. Atria’s own copy says only that “as suspicions and accusations mount and the town teeters on the edge of more violence,” Dern struggles. According to Krueger’s own site, it was an Edgar Award nominee for Best Novel and an instant national bestseller. Give it a Saturday.

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9. The Only One Left by Riley Sager (2023)

In 1983 a disgraced home caregiver named Kit McDeere is assigned to look after Lenora Hope at Hope’s End, a Gothic mansion on the Maine coast. According to Kirkus, “back in 1929, Lenora allegedly murdered her parents and sister,” and she has lived in the house where it happened ever since. A series of strokes took Lenora’s speech. She can still type, and Kit sets a typewriter in front of her. Lenora has not given her account of 1929 to anybody in fifty-four years.

The book alternates between Kit in 1983 and Lenora’s typewritten account of 1929. The official story and the accused woman’s version sit on facing pages, and you have to pick one every few paragraphs. Kirkus Reviews was mixed on it, calling it “an entertaining thriller if you can give yourself over to its sillier plot devices,” and honestly that is a fair warning. It goes big. It still works. Sager makes a woman the whole state suspected type the account out one key at a time.

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Why We Keep Reading About Towns That Already Decided

Most of the time it isn’t a conspiracy. A sheriff needs the file closed before the county fair. A family needs to stop being asked about it at Christmas. Whichever explanation costs the fewest people anything is the one that ends up on the form. Everyone in Kiewarra assumed Luke Hadler did it himself. And Violet was sixteen and had just survived the storm that killed her best friend, so obviously she was confused by grief.

Judy Luptack is the junior investigator whose male colleagues ask whether women are cut out for the work. Goldie Easton is a townie on a camp payroll. Violet Crisp is the sixteen-year-old two grown men told to stop talking. Nobody senior is reading any of their notes. I have a whole list of female detectives who work like this, and another of cold cases somebody would not let go.

I recognize the town in every one of these missing girl thrillers. If you grew up somewhere everyone knows whose truck that is, you already know how a file gets closed. I wrote The Storm Reaper because I wanted to be in the room when somebody finally pulls one back out. If you want more of these, here are the small town mystery series I go back to.

What to Read Next

If you want one more, The Storm Reaper is the Fire Island detective thriller I wrote about a ten-year-old file nobody but one officer wanted reopened.

FAQ: Books Like The God of the Woods

What Are the Best Books Like The God of the Woods by Liz Moore?

If you are hunting books like The God of the Woods by Liz Moore, start with The Dry by Jane Harper, All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda, Long Bright River by Liz Moore, The Counselors by Jessica Goodman, The It Girl by Ruth Ware, We Were Liars by E. Lockhart. After those, The River We Remember by William Kent Krueger and The Only One Left by Riley Sager. The Storm Reaper, a Fire Island detective thriller, is on the list at number two.

Where Is The God of the Woods Set?

The God of the Woods book is set at Camp Emerson, a fictional summer camp in New York’s Adirondacks, owned by the Van Laar family. According to the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, “at six million acres, the Adirondack Park is the largest protected region in the contiguous United States.” The department adds that it is “larger than Yellowstone, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, and Glacier National Parks combined.” Moore sends her search parties into that on foot, in August, at night.

Is The God of the Woods Based on a True Story?

No. The God of the Woods book is fiction: Barbara Van Laar, Bear, Camp Emerson and the Van Laar family are Liz Moore’s invention. The Adirondacks are real, and so are the summer camp thrillers set in them. According to Kirkus Reviews, the novel was published on July 2, 2024 by Riverhead, and Riverhead lists it as a New York Times bestseller and People magazine’s number one book of the year.

Are Any of These Books Being Adapted for Film or TV?

Three of them. The Dry became a film starring Eric Bana as Aaron Falk. Long Bright River was adapted as an eight-episode Peacock miniseries starring Amanda Seyfried, which premiered on March 13, 2025. We Were Liars is a Prime Video series, and according to Amazon MGM Studios, all eight episodes were released on June 18, 2025 “in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide.”

Which of These Books Has the Strongest Female Investigator?

The God of the Woods has Judy Luptack, whom Kirkus Reviews calls “the young and unproven assistant investigator,” pressing forward “unswayed by her bullying father and male colleagues who question whether women are ‘cut out for this work.’” Long Bright River, the other of the two Liz Moore books here, has patrol officer Mickey Fitzpatrick. The Storm Reaper has Violet Crisp, a Fire Island police officer working a case nobody believed her about at sixteen. Goodreads reviewer Alison Hoeksema wrote that “Violet’s past family history and reputation on Fire Island are cleverly interwoven with her present career as a police officer.”

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