So I’ve been bemoaning this all over Goodreads for a couple of weeks now, but I’ve been in a five-star drought since 2022 started. (I wonder if it’s because the last book I read in 2021, Harrow the Ninth, was one of the most five-star books I’ve ever read, and the universe is just balancing itself out . . . )
I’ve been waiting, impatiently, to see what book would capture my emotions enough for me to slap that coveted five-star rating on, as I’ve definitely gotten much more picky over what I will give five stars to since I joined Goodreads in 2008, and definitely since I started reviewing almost every book I read when I joined CBR. By this time last year, though, I had given out five five-star ratings, so I was getting genuinely worried*. A couple have gotten close in the first twenty-five days of January, but always biffed it in the end. This book was the opposite. It snuck up on me. It made me love these characters while I wasn’t paying attention, and by the end when everything came together I was just so satisfied (I could use other words here, but I don’t want to spoil anything without spoiler tags).
*This is a dumb thing to worry about, but I generally stack January and February with books I’m really looking forward to reading, so it makes sense that there would be more five-star ratings concentrated there.
This is just a story really well told. And it is a genuine pleasure to read one of those, no matter the genre.
Here, Moriarty takes on some of the trappings of the mystery genre, when Delaney family matriarch Joy goes missing. Her phone was left behind under the bed, none of her belongings are missing, and the only evidence they have of her whereabouts is an almost unintelligible text saying she was going “OFF-GRID”. Left behind are her four adult children: Amy, Logan, Troy, and Brooke, along with grumpy, untalkative husband Stan. They are a tennis family. Both Joy and Stan played professionally, and when they married they started their own tennis school, which they have just sold for quite a bit of money, and are now officially retired. Only, neither of them are taking to retirement well, and it seems that all that free time, along with mysterious houseguest Savannah, who shows up shoeless and injured on their doorstep one night, acts as a catalyst for some long-simmering family tensions.
Mostly, the story is told from Joy’s point of view about six months in the past, and from the four kids’ POV’s in the present, as their worry for their missing mother turns into a police investigation, digging up old secrets of course, but also making all the Delaneys face up to things about themselves they maybe haven’t wanted to face until now, and reevaluating things they’d long thought settled. There are occasional interludes from random people adjacent to the Delaneys, like hairdressers, neighbors, pedicurists, and also POVs from the two detectives searching for Joy, and eventually, investigating her murder.
As I said above, this book snuck up on me. I loved Joy from the first page, but the rest of them took a bit longer, and by the end of the book I was incredibly invested in the fate of this family not only as a whole, but in the happiness of each member individually. Moriarty really does have a talent for making characters come to life on the page, and she writes flawed people very well, in the way that you see their flaws, but they only make them feel more human and not less likable for it. In fact, she frequently takes unlikable characters and makes you fall for them anyway.
This part will be spoilers.
SPOILERS Perhaps the best thing Moriarty does with this book, though, is play on the reader’s emotions through the use of mystery/crime tropes. The entire book is preparing you for Joy’s death to be discovered, and your attention is directed by the narrative to interpret everything you see as evidence for or against WHAT HAPPENED TO JOY and WHO DID IT and WHY. But in the end she uses those expectations against you, and even if you see it coming, it’s still a complete pleasure the moment Stan, who is moments from being arrested for her murder, turns to see Joy standing in the doorway and bursts into joyful tears. We see not only in that moment how much he does love her, but how important it is that these people work things out. We also have gone on this journey with these characters, and we too love Joy. It’s such a relief when she makes it home alive, and then Moriarty (perhaps indulgently, but I do not care one bit) spends the remainder of the novel nudging the other main characters in better directions for their lives. The kicker is the epilogue, where we find out something about houseguest Savannah that just places the perfect last note to the story END SPOILERS.
I really, really enjoyed this one. Maybe I will finally get around to the rest of Moriarty’s backlist this year.
