In the 19th century, authors snuck mystery elements into their stories and an exciting and popular new genre gradually emerged. In “The Night We Lost Him” (October, hardcover), Laura Dave brings readers in with a mystery of who pushed Liam Noone off a Pacific Ocean cliff to his death one rainy night.
The trick is that this novel – Dave’s seventh – is actually a character drama; the mystery is the easy-appeal entry point. The author probes into the natures of Liam’s daughter Nora (the first-person narrator in most chapters) and son Sam – they come from Liam’s first and second families, respectively – as they investigate the death that the lazy California investigator decides was an accident.
Searching for answers, balance
It’s not a crass trick, though. I could tell “TNWLH” is more of a family and romantic drama than a mystery, yet the mystery kept me coming back. Throwing sleuthing fans another bone, there’s a second mystery, about the identity of a woman Liam has loved his entire life. But he never married her, instead marrying three other women in succession and producing three children.
“The Night We Lost Him” (2024)
Author: Laura Dave
Genres: Mystery, family drama
Setting: New York City and California; present day, with flashbacks
Note to readers: The Book Club Book Report series features books I’m reading for my book club, Brilliant Bookworms.
Dave crafts both mysteries in sprightly but fair fashion, with one great (in retrospect quite clear) clue pointing to the identity of the murderer and another pointing to the identity of the woman, who is known as Cory in flashbacks but who goes by another name in present day. The author also uses one impressive misdirection in both of the mysteries, relying on readers to say “Ah, I’ve figured it out” when she’s actually waving a trope as a distraction.
The book’s heart, and best aspects, though, are the relationship dramas among the various Noones, all of whom work in architecture in some fashion. Nora is a New York City-based neuroarchitect; she designs spaces to enhance the mental health of the resident. I hadn’t heard of this job before, but I like the concept.
Nora, in her early 30s, is struggling to be present in her relationship with her chef boyfriend, Jack. Sam seems to have followed his father’s cad nature, as he’s married to one woman – the busy-busy-busy Morgan, the book’s only one-dimensional character – but in love with another.
That’s Liam’s core trait, too, as we see interspersed flashbacks that take us from his college years up to his murder. He and Cory are immediately in love, and he wants to marry her, but – even aside from the logistics of their separate career paths — she believes it’s not in his nature to be content with marriage to one woman. So they continue to see each other regularly through the decades, even though both of them go through other relationships.
An unusual but sweet love story
This is the riskiest part of “TNWLH,” because a reader is going to yell at the page “Just openly be a couple!” Verisimilitude comes because that’s what Liam wants to do. But while one could argue that Cory’s position – rejecting his proposals through the decades – forces her prophecy to fulfill itself, we also get plenty of evidence that she’s correct: Liam is not by his nature a one-woman man.
This love story is out of the box, but its appeal extends to simply being very sweet. Because their love is never codified, and in fact is kept secret from friends and family, it has a specialness that wouldn’t happen if accompanied by governmental paperwork.
Would this work in real life? Are there true stories like this? I don’t know, but in fiction, Dave pulls off a trick wherein Liam and Cory extend the magic of the first days of love through their entire lives. Romance never transitions to mundanity.
In real life, this method of keeping the spark alive might be ill-advised for many reasons. In fiction, it makes for an epic romance. (In screen fiction, would it ring true? Due to Dave’s rising success, we might find out someday. The trick relies a lot on not being able to see the characters, but I think it could be translated.)
Still, I don’t know if I’d have admired the Liam-Cory love story beyond the abstract if not for the mystery that drives the page-turning. I want to know who killed Liam, always aware that the answer will be tied to the answer about the romance. Dave writes respectfully in two genres at the same time – with each enhancing the other — and “The Night We Lost Him” turns out better than the sum of its two parts.