Liz Moore

Reading List

Authors Like Liz Moore

In August 1975 a thirteen-year-old girl goes missing from her bunk at a summer camp in the Adirondacks. Her name is Barbara Van Laar, her family owns the land the camp sits on, and fourteen years earlier her older brother disappeared from the same property and was never found. The God of the Woods (Riverhead, July 2024, around 480 pages) runs six points of view across four decades: the missing girl, her mother, a camp counsellor, a local investigator, and the townspeople whose jobs vanished when the paper mill closed and who now work for the family that owns everything. Barack Obama put it on his summer list, Netflix greenlit a series in December 2025 with Moore writing and producing alongside Liz Hannah, and it was the most-borrowed book in Philadelphia's public libraries. Her previous novel, Long Bright River (2019), is about two sisters in the Kensington neighbourhood of Philadelphia — one a patrol officer, one missing amid the opioid crisis — and became a Peacock series with Amanda Seyfried in 2025. A sixth novel exists and that is all anyone knows: asked about it, she said nothing can be said about the novel in progress. The ten below are chosen on class, on missing people and on how a plot resolves.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Literary crime · Class, families, missing people · Five novels · Updated September 2026

Quick answer

If you love Liz Moore, the closest match is Donna Tartt — reviewers compared The God of the Woods to The Secret History for good reason, and both are about a closed institution and money that protects people. Tana French is the finest literary crime novelist working, and Rebecca Makkai, who blurbed the book, wrote the boarding-school version. Daphne du Maurier is the ancestor of the great house and the vanished woman. For Long Bright River, read Beth Macy. And Jon McGregor is the argument against: a missing girl and no answer at all.

Every book by Liz Moore →

Where to start if you loved Liz Moore

If you want the closest match, read Donna Tartt.

The Secret History. A closed institution, money, and a death announced on page one.

If you want the best in the genre, read Tana French.

Broken Harbour. A ghost estate after the crash, and a detective it will break.

If you want the same novel a year earlier, read Rebecca Makkai.

I Have Some Questions for You. A boarding school, a 1995 murder, a wrong conviction.

If you loved Long Bright River, read Beth Macy.

Dopesick. The reporting underneath the novel, from the marketing onwards.

If you want the argument against her, read Jon McGregor.

Reservoir 13. The same missing girl, and no answer for thirteen years.

If you want more novels of this kind

My shelf of the best fiction has the rest.

10 authors like Liz Moore

01
The closed institution and the money · Closest match

Donna Tartt

American · The Secret History (1992), The Goldfinch (2013)

The Secret History opens by telling you who was killed and by whom, and then spends five hundred pages on how a small group of classics students at an expensive Vermont college arrived there. The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014, follows a boy who takes a painting out of a bombed museum. Tartt writes slowly, roughly one novel a decade, and each one is long, plotted and set among people whose money changes what happens to them.

The comparison the reviews reached for immediately, and it is exact. Both build a large, absorbing novel around a closed institution — a college, a summer camp — where privilege determines who is investigated and who is protected, and both let you live inside the world long enough that the ordinary one recedes. Tartt is more baroque and more interested in beauty; Moore is more interested in the people cleaning up afterwards. Read The Secret History.

— Lisanne
Every book by Donna Tartt →

Authors like Donna Tartt →

02
Literary crime at its best

Tana French

Irish · In the Woods (2007), Broken Harbour (2012), The Hunter (2024)

French was an actor before writing the Dublin Murder Squad novels, each narrated by a different detective who is damaged in a way the case will exploit. In the Woods won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Barry awards for best first novel. Broken Harbour is set on an abandoned ghost estate after the Irish crash; The Searcher and The Hunter move west to a village where a retired Chicago policeman wants to be left alone.

The writer Moore is most often measured against, and the one who established that a detective novel could carry this much psychological and class weight without apologising for the genre. Both are interested in a place where economic collapse has rearranged who owes what to whom. French is the better prose stylist and far less inclined to resolve things comfortably. Read Broken Harbour.

— Lisanne

Every book by Tana French →

03
The boarding school version

Rebecca Makkai

American · The Great Believers (2018), I Have Some Questions for You (2023)

I Have Some Questions for You sends a podcaster back to the New Hampshire boarding school where a classmate was murdered in 1995, to teach a two-week course and to discover that the man convicted may not have done it. The Great Believers, about the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Chicago and its aftermath in Paris, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. She blurbed The God of the Woods when it appeared.

The closest contemporary, and the two novels appeared within a year of each other doing recognisably the same thing: an old disappearance at an elite institution, reopened by someone with a personal stake, with the class and gender assumptions of the original investigation as the real subject. Makkai is more essayistic and more explicitly angry about true crime as entertainment. Read it directly after.

— Lisanne
04
The missing child, worked backwards

Celeste Ng

American · Everything I Never Told You (2014), Little Fires Everywhere (2017)

Everything I Never Told You opens with a sixteen-year-old dead in a lake in 1970s Ohio and works backwards through what each member of her family needed her to be. Little Fires Everywhere sets a custody fight loose in Shaker Heights, a suburb planned down to the permitted paint colours, and became a Hulu series with Reese Witherspoon and Kerry Washington.

The same structure and the same fault line. Both open with a girl who is gone, both use the search as a way of taking a family and a community apart, and both are finally about class and who gets believed. Ng has no detective and no procedural machinery; the investigation is entirely emotional. If the Van Laar family interested you more than the search did, read Little Fires Everywhere.

— Lisanne
Every book by Celeste Ng →

Authors like Celeste Ng →

05
Class and crime, in Boston

Dennis Lehane

American · Mystic River (2001), Shutter Island (2003), Small Mercies (2023)

Mystic River follows three men from a working-class Boston neighbourhood whose lives were altered by an abduction in childhood and who meet again when one of their daughters is murdered; Clint Eastwood filmed it in 2003. Small Mercies is set in South Boston during the busing crisis of 1974, with a mother looking for her missing daughter. Lehane has also written for The Wire.

The other great American novelist of crime as a class story. Lehane's neighbourhoods work exactly like Moore's Adirondack town: everybody has known everybody for generations, the money lives somewhere else, and an investigation exposes what the community has agreed not to discuss. He is angrier and writes better dialogue; she is better on institutions. Read Mystic River, then Small Mercies.

— Lisanne
06
The same questions, in East Texas

Attica Locke

American · Bluebird, Bluebird (2017), Heaven, My Home (2019), Guide Me Home (2024)

The Highway 59 novels follow Darren Mathews, a Black Texas Ranger working small towns along the highway where the sheriff, the bar owner and the suspect all have histories with each other, and where a murder investigation runs immediately into who owns the land. Bluebird, Bluebird won the Edgar Award for best novel. Locke has also written for television, including Empire and When They See Us.

The same conviction that a crime novel is the right instrument for examining who a place actually belongs to. Locke adds what Moore's Adirondacks largely do not have: race as the organising fact rather than class alone. Both write investigators who are structurally outmatched by the families they are investigating. Read Bluebird, Bluebird.

— Lisanne
07
The landscape as the antagonist

Jane Harper

Australian · The Dry (2016), The Lost Man (2018)

The Dry takes a federal agent back to the drought-stricken farming town he left as a teenager, for the funeral of a friend who apparently killed his own family, and into a twenty-year-old death everyone has an agreed story about; it won the CWA Gold Dagger and was filmed in 2020 with Eric Bana. The Lost Man is set on an enormous Queensland cattle station where a man is found dead beside a stockman's grave.

The nearest match for what the Adirondacks do in The God of the Woods: a landscape that is genuinely dangerous, a town with one employer and long memories, and a returning outsider who used to belong. Harper is leaner and more purely a crime writer; Moore is doing more with the historical span. If the forest was what held you, read The Lost Man.

— Lisanne
Every book by Jane Harper →
08
After Long Bright River

Beth Macy

American · Factory Man (2014), Dopesick (2018), Raising Lazarus (2022)

Dopesick traces the American opioid epidemic from the marketing of OxyContin in the 1990s through Appalachian towns and into the families left behind, built from years of reporting in Virginia; Hulu adapted it in 2021 with Michael Keaton. Raising Lazarus follows the people trying to treat addiction in places where treatment is scarce, and is unusually direct about what actually works.

The reporting underneath Long Bright River. Moore wrote that novel after spending time in Kensington, and Macy is where to go if the sisters made you want the facts — how a pharmaceutical marketing campaign became a public health catastrophe, and what happens to a neighbourhood afterwards. She writes people rather than statistics, which is why it works alongside a novel rather than against it.

— Lisanne

Every book by Beth Macy →

09
Older than the genre · The great house

Daphne du Maurier

British · Rebecca (1938), My Cousin Rachel (1951)

Rebecca is narrated by an unnamed young woman who marries a wealthy widower and arrives at Manderley to find the house, the staff and the county still organised around his first wife, who drowned. Hitchcock filmed it in 1940 and it won the Academy Award for best picture. Du Maurier wrote seventeen novels and the stories behind The Birds and Don't Look Now, and died in 1989.

The ancestor of the whole arrangement: an estate, a family whose money makes its version of events the official one, a woman who vanished, and an outsider who can see what the household has agreed to believe. The Van Laar house and its permanent staff are Manderley with an American accent. Read Rebecca and the class machinery in Moore's novel becomes visible as a tradition rather than a theme.

— Lisanne
10
The argument against her

Jon McGregor

British · If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things (2002), Reservoir 13 (2017)

Reservoir 13 begins with a thirteen-year-old girl missing from a Peak District village at New Year, and then spends thirteen chapters, one per year, following the village: the lambing, the pantomime, the reservoir, the marriages, the badgers. The search recedes. No answer is given. It won the Costa Novel Award and was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

The direct rebuttal to everything Moore's plotting exists to do. Same premise — a girl of thirteen gone from a rural community — and the opposite contract with the reader: McGregor refuses to solve it, because in life these cases mostly are not solved and the village has to keep going anyway. Moore gives you six viewpoints, four decades and every thread tied. Read fifty pages of Reservoir 13 and you will know which you actually want from a book like this.

— Lisanne

Frequently asked questions about authors like Liz Moore

Who should I read if I love Liz Moore?

Donna Tartt is the closest, and reviewers made the Secret History comparison from the first notices. Tana French is the finest literary crime novelist working and Rebecca Makkai wrote the boarding-school version of the same book a year earlier. Celeste Ng opens with a missing girl and works backwards without a detective, Dennis Lehane and Attica Locke write crime as a class and race story, and Jane Harper matches the dangerous landscape. Beth Macy is the non-fiction to read after Long Bright River, Daphne du Maurier is the ancestor, and Jon McGregor is the argument against the tidy resolution.

Is Liz Moore writing a new book?

Yes, and that is all she will say. She confirmed a sixth novel on NPR's Fresh Air in January 2026 and declined to give a title, a subject or a date, explaining that she rarely shows anyone anything before it is finished — usually only her agent or editor — because talking about a book in progress knocks the wind out of her sails. She is also writing and producing the Netflix adaptation of The God of the Woods with Liz Hannah.

Which Liz Moore book should I start with?

The God of the Woods (2024), which is her best and needs no prior reading: two children from the same wealthy family vanish from the same Adirondack property fourteen years apart, and the novel moves between six characters and four decades. Long Bright River (2019) if you want the shorter, more urgent one: two sisters in Philadelphia, one a police officer and one missing. Heft (2012) is the quiet early novel her longtime readers rate highest.

Is The God of the Woods being made into a series?

Yes. Sony Pictures Television acquired the rights in July 2024, weeks after publication, and Netflix greenlit the series in December 2025, with Moore writing and producing alongside Liz Hannah. No cast or release date has been announced as of September 2026. Long Bright River was adapted first, as a Peacock series starring Amanda Seyfried, which aired in 2025 and which Moore also worked on.

What was the book almost called?

Self-Reliance, after the name of the Van Laar family's Adirondack estate — a deliberately ironic title, given that the house was built by the townspeople the family employs. Moore has said everyone at her publisher told her simultaneously that they hated it, mainly because it sounded like a self-help book. The point it was making about class survives in the finished novel; only the title went.

Is Long Bright River based on a true story?

Not on a specific case. Moore moved to Philadelphia in 2009 and spent years in and around Kensington, a neighbourhood at the centre of the city's opioid crisis, including volunteer and community work, before writing it. The two sisters are invented; the conditions are reported. It was the only one of her novels set in Philadelphia, where she has lived since, and she teaches in the MFA programme at Temple University.

What order should I read her books in?

Any order — five standalone novels with no shared characters. By publication: The Words of Every Song (2007), Heft (2012), The Unseen World (2016), Long Bright River (2019) and The God of the Woods (2024). Most readers arrive at the last one first and work backwards, which is fine; the earlier novels are quieter and less plotted, and Heft in particular is worth going back for.

Is it a crime novel or literary fiction?

Both, and the refusal to choose is the point. The God of the Woods has a missing child, an investigation, timelines that converge and a resolution, and it also has six developed points of view, a forty-year historical span and a sustained argument about who a piece of land belongs to. Reviewers described it as never seeming overplotted despite how much machinery is in it. If you want the same combination handled by other writers, Tana French and Attica Locke are the ones to read.

Nothing here was suggested by a machine. I picked these ten myself, and the reasons are on the page.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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“Nothing can be said about the novel in progress.”

— Liz Moore, on her sixth novel, NPR Fresh Air, 2026.

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