The Night We Lost Him by Laura Dave markets itself as a mystery and a thriller, but it’s not exactly what you would expect from the genre. It’s a softer sort of mystery, often a touching and emotional one.
Nora and Sam are estranged siblings, raised separately by different mothers, who just lost their father. The authorities say that he fell from the cliffs behind his California beach refuge, but Sam thinks there’s more to the story than what the police are saying. Their father knew those cliffs like the back of his hand, and Sam doesn’t think there’s any way that he would just fall. Sam ropes Nora into his cross-country quest for the truth.
The siblings uncover that neither of them knew their father as well as they hoped and that he had secrets going back to the very beginning. In their journey to discover what really happened, they discover important things about themselves and their relationships too.
There is no shortage of family drama in The Night We Lost Him. Sibling dynamics, marriage dynamics, and breaking relationships abound, each factoring into Nora’s exploration of her father’s life and death. In the beginning, this book has Succession vibes a little bit, but as it goes on, the author reveals something much sweeter, and much more relatable, with a love story spanning more than 5o years.
The author manages to fuse really delightful moments of humor and touching, loving moments into a mystery, which is always a joy to find in this kind of story. For a story about a wealthy hotel magnate who falls to his death, it was certainly an emotional and deeply meaningful story.
This story had twists and turns that I truly didn’t expect, but ones that are revealed slowly, and feel less like yanking the reader in a whole new direction and more like the pieces of a puzzle falling perfectly into place.
Some reviewers called this book slow, but I would call it gentle. I still read it in a single day. It’s a more realistic thriller than readers seemed to be prepared for. There’s no gratuitous violence, no heart-racing action. None of the characters, besides the initial victim, are ever in mortal danger. It’s just a family and a mystery and years and layers of a story. I found it utterly captivating.
Writing: 4
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