The ultimate reveal is satisfying, if troubling. Starting with the abandoned bike that's found by a passing motorist on the first page, the evidence that accumulates around what happened to Joy constantly challenges the reader both to notice which minor details (and characters) matter and to distinguish between red herrings and buried clues. Moriarty is a master of ambiguity and also of the small, telling detail like a tossed tennis racket or the repeated appearance of apple crumble. Who is Savannah? Whether she’s innocent, scamming, or something else remains unclear on many levels. Here, Moriarty returns to the day a stranger named Savannah turned up bleeding on the Delaneys’ doorstep and Joy welcomed her to stay for an extended visit.
The structure follows the pattern of Big Little Lies (2014) by setting up a mystery and then jumping months into the past to unravel it. As worrisome details come to light, the police become involved. But days pass and Joy remains missing and uncharacteristically silent. 14, 2020 (note the date), the last text she sends to her now-grown kids-bohemian Amy, passive Logan, flashy Troy, and migraine-suffering Brooke-is too garbled by autocorrect to decipher and stubborn Stan refuses to accept that there might be a problem.
Their long, complicated marriage has been filled with perhaps as much passion for the game of tennis as for each other or their children. Joy and Stan Delaney met as champion tennis players more than 50 years ago and ran a well-regarded tennis academy until their recent retirement. Australian novelist Moriarty combines domestic realism and noirish mystery in this story about the events surrounding a 69-year-old Sydney woman’s disappearance.
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