“Truly Madly Guilty” By Liane Moriarty (Flatiron, 415 pages, $26.99)

The parents in Liane Moriarty’s darkly humorous novels are much like parents anywhere: Loving, busy, distracted, juggling their children’s needs and their own desires as they negotiate the difficulties of adult relationships, jobs and the past, which intrudes at the least convenient moment.

They live in the suburbs unaware of the dark side of human nature — or at least ignoring it — until the wily Moriarty yanks hard at the foundations they take for granted and upends their delicately balanced lives. This pattern may be tough on her characters, but for us, it’s a blast, and it has made her new novel, “Truly Madly Guilty,” one of the most anticipated books of the summer. Here’s the best news you’ve heard all year: Not a single page disappoints.

Not so long ago, Moriarty, an Australian who lives in Sydney with her family, was not a household name in this country. But with her last two novels, “The Husband’s Secret” and “Big Little Lies,” she has crossed into the mainstream, and the mainstream is much better for it. In “Truly Madly Guilty,” she follows the template she perfected in “Big Little Lies” (currently being adapted as an HBO series with Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman): She hints at a cataclysmic event in the first chapter, then spends the rest of the book building up to the reveal.

In “Big Little Lies,” somebody — who? why? — ends up dead at parents’ trivia night at the local school. In “Truly Madly Guilty,” something disastrous has occurred at a backyard barbecue, and three couples are trying to pull themselves together in its wake. Clementine, a classical cellist gearing up for a big audition, and her affable husband Sam, are parents to two small daughters (the youngest carries around a whisk as a toy, named, appropriately, Whisk). Erika, Clementine’s childhood friend, and her husband Oliver are childless perfectionists, and Oliver and Erika’s neighbors Vid and Tiffany, the hosts of the gathering, are the outgoing, successful parents to 10-year-old Dakota.

Against this spiky backdrop, the two women and their friends and families confront the revelations and fears and guilt brought on by the calamitous barbecue.

Moriarty’s sly sense of humor, vivid characters and her frank appraisal of suburban life make it clear that this barbecue could have happened anywhere, to anyone. The dilemma is universal — and irresistible. The only difficulty with the book? Putting it down.