Book 61 of 2024: Middletide by Sarah Crouch

Rating: ⭐️⭐️💫/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

One morning, in the small Puget Sound town of Point Orchards, the lifeless body of Dr. Erin Landry is found hanging from a tree on the property of Elijah Leith. Sheriff Jim Godbout’s initial investigation points to an obvious suicide, but upon closer inspection, there seem to be clues of foul play when he discovers that the circumstances of the beautiful doctor’s death were ripped straight from the pages of Elijah’s own novel. Out of money and motivation, Elijah returns to his empty childhood home to lick the wounds of his failed writing career. He throws himself into restoring the ramshackle cabin his father left behind and rekindling his relationship with Nakita, the extraordinary girl from the nearby reservation whom he was never able to forget. As the town of Point Orchards turns against him, Elijah must fight for his innocence against an unexpected foe who is close and cunning enough to flawlessly frame him for murder.

This book had a lot of potential, but I found the execution a little lackluster. The majority of the book was a very slow. The story was told in dual timelines, switching between present day, murder investigation, and Elijah‘s past I found myself struggling through Elijah‘s past sections quite a bit; while they were laying the ground for the story and introducing all of the complexities of the various characters, they were sometimes a bit long-winded, and I found myself wanting to figure out more about what happened. The story developed slowly and the last quarter of the book moves much faster. I also feel weird about the author and venting a Native American tribe for the sake of the story. I didn’t really find that the Native American tribe had much influence over the story so I kept questioning why it was necessary for the author to do this. I understand that perhaps she did not want to misrepresent an existing tribe, but it felt like a strange choice. The ending of the novel was satisfying and wrapped up everything nicely, and the writing was quite good, but there were just a few things I could not get past that made this book fall short of my expectations.