Rosemary Cooke, a quiet college student, grew up with her sister Fern and her older brother Lowell. Both, however, have long since vanished from her and their parents' lives. You have to wait until page 77 for the explanation for their disappearance, but it's not too hard to work it out for yourself – Rosemary grew up in the 1970s, and her father was a psychology professor at Indiana University. "Psychologists," she tells us, "didn't leave their work at the office. They brought it home. They conducted experiments around the breakfast table, made freak shows of their own families, and all to answer questions nice people wouldn't even think to ask." Think Project Nim and you get the idea.

Some might say I'm spoiling the twist, but given what plays out (as Rosemary pieces together the real story behind Fern's removal from her family, Lowell's estrangement, and the unwitting role Rosemary herself played in events), a novel that is both one giant moral compass and a harrowing depiction of a family's implosion, the prose of which zings on the pages – a grandmother, for example, for whom "conspiracy is folded into her DNA like egg whites into angel food cakes" – deserves to be acclaimed for the right reasons. Focusing all the attention on the twist threatens to obscure Fowler's other more considerable talents.