In 2021, Laura Dave made the dramatic leap from nuanced family dramas with a touch of romance to mystery and suspense with the release of THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME. Not only was it a bestseller, it's a hit series on Apple TV+. To say that the transition was a success would be putting it mildly. But now, with the release of THE NIGHT WE LOST HIM, Dave proves that it was no fluke.

Liam Samuel Noone, a self-made hotel magnate, was a complicated man. Born and raised in Midwood, Brooklyn, he vowed early on to flee his hometown trappings and never return so he could really make something of himself. After graduating from Yale and securing his MBA, Liam became famous for transforming a small family-owned chain of hotels into the most sought-after luxury boutique hotel empire in the country. But he also was fiercely devoted to his families. Yes, plural.

Married and divorced three times, and the father to one daughter and two sons, Liam dedicated himself to always giving whomever was in front of him his best, even if that meant compartmentalizing his life to a fault. But all of this is secondary to the most crucial fact of all: On the night we meet Liam --- right in the book’s first few pages --- he has been pushed from a cliff on his remote property in Carpinteria, California. With no witnesses, the reader is the first to know the truth.

"...an intriguing mystery... Spanning 50 years, two coasts and more than a few fractured families, THE NIGHT WE LOST HIM is captivating and twisty, but it is also emotionally resonant and deeply tender."

Some months later, we meet his daughter from his first marriage, Nora, as she is getting together with a client as part of her work as a neuroarchitect --- an approach focused not just on architecture and design, but on the feeling of the space and its occupant’s overall well-being. The client, a young bride-to-be, says that her fiancé is planning to join them. Surprisingly, he turns out to be Nora’s half-brother, Sam.

Sam and his twin, Tommy, have worked with their father since they came of age, and it’s well known that they are the heirs to his empire, which Nora wants no part of. With their connecting parent dead and the company placed solely in the brothers’ hands, it makes sense that they have not seen each other much over the last few years. Sam isn’t there to admire his new home, plan for a renovation or even check on his half-sister. He believes that their father’s death was no accident, despite the police’s conclusion that he slipped and fell on a rainy night.

Nora is dubious, to say the least, but there is one thing she can’t ignore: in a family kept almost entirely separate and raised by a man as compartmentalized as an Ikea warehouse, Sam would not approach Nora unless he was absolutely certain there was something to look into. So she follows Sam to Windbreak, their father’s private home. It was his sanctuary, the place where he felt most himself...and the setting of his death.

Every bit as sharp as their exacting (or exhausting, depending on how you look at him) father, the siblings are quickly able to determine that the police investigation was subpar at best, with one notable flaw. The primary witness, a jogger who stumbled across Liam’s body on the beach, has disappeared, and the police don’t seem interested in interviewing him. Further discussions with their father’s caretaker add more layers to the (potential) mystery. Liam was not even supposed to be at Windbreak that night, and he told no one he was coming. Now his children know for sure that something is up.

As Nora, Sam and Tommy continue to interview the people closest to their father --- his cousin turned business partner, their Uncle Joe; Cece Salinger, his main competitor; and even Paul, the husband of his late business partner, Grace --- they start to suspect that his firm boundaries were not only to avoid complicating his life or meshing his families, but to hide a deeper, decades-old secret. With the company’s files, or at least his most private files, locked away, his cell phone missing and no obvious leads, they will have to reckon with his complicated legacy and bear witness to his life once and for all…even the hidden corners he never wanted them to see.

What follows is an intriguing mystery to determine the true state of Liam’s mind, estate and business at the time of his death and who would have wanted him gone from all of it. But more than that, it is a crystalline, razor-sharp character study of a man as seen through his children’s lives. Alternating between Nora and Sam’s investigation (and slow reunion) and chapters set 50 years earlier, when Liam was just a young man desperate for more, Laura Dave pens a riveting novel that reads as a soulful suspense, a love story for the ages wrapped in a tightly woven mystery…and, perhaps most of all, a poignant, moving story of grief --- grief for the dead, but also grief for lives unlived, love stories untold and families unbound.

Spanning 50 years, two coasts and more than a few fractured families, THE NIGHT WE LOST HIM is captivating and twisty, but it is also emotionally resonant and deeply tender. In unpacking the complicated, tightly packed life of Liam Noone, Dave asks the painful, almost unanswerable question: How well can you ever really know someone, and what does it mean to bear witness to someone’s life? Through her sibling characters, she answers that question with yet another, even more gripping one: What is the cost of reckoning with all the disparate, conflicting sides of someone you love?

Through Nora, we learn the truth. While you can love someone and spend a lifetime trying to learn them, there always will be parts that they save just for themselves. But bravery and love will expose them in bright, healing light.