Where she excels is in the way all of her characters spring from the page so fully formed that I would feel comfortable selecting their clothes, ordering their meals and guessing their attitudes toward the newest releases on Netflix. (Moriarty often gives issues of race a sidelong glance while parsing the class distinctions among whites with razor-sharp precision.) And while there is indeed an investigation into Joy’s disappearance, it feels more like an afterthought than a pressing matter, perhaps just an excuse for introducing a little ethnic diversity in the form of two detectives. “We have temporarily mislaid our mother.” Even as the clues pile up, Joy’s vanishing seems more curious than urgent - a signal that if you’re expecting the Night Stalker, you won’t find him in this Sydney suburb. “Our mother is possibly missing,” one of them tells an eavesdropping waitress.

The senior Delaneys may have been inspired and crafty on court, but at home they give in to crude laments that their apples have fallen so far afield.Īs furious as the Delaney children were about the family interloper, they remain oddly blasé about their mother’s disappearance.

Despite their athletic prowess none of them made it to center court at Wimbledon - a tall order, if you ask me. While Stan simmers in front of the television, Joy putters about, baffled by her four towering, worrisome children, whose failure to produce a single offspring enrages her. But after selling their tennis academy they’ve had too much energy and too little purpose. Their union seems perfect both on and off the court - that is, until Joy goes missing a few months before her 70th birthday.įor decades, the Delaneys dominated mixed doubles and celebrated their wins with rowdy displays of affection that raised eyebrows in the clubhouse. When we meet the Delaneys - petite, spunky Joy and her hulking bear of a husband, Stan, both former Australian tennis stars - they’ve logged nearly 50 years of a passionate yet complex marriage. I couldn’t quite square the title of Liane Moriarty’s new novel, “Apples Never Fall,” with the family story it unfurls.

Apples never fall synopsis